Yesterday, the US National Institutes of Health announced that they would “not fund any use of gene-editing technologies in human embryos.” The announcement came in a statement from the NIH’s director and former US head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins. This area is controversial, and has been the subject of a great deal of recent debate, with some scientists calling for a moratorium on human embryology research, others on the move into treatment. (more…)
Five months on from the publication of our report The Culture of Scientific Research, Catherine Joynson reflects on the response so far, and our future plans.
Last Thursday I took the train from Paddington to Bristol to speak at an evening discussion event in the city’s harbourside arts cinema, the Watershed. The debate, titled ‘Nature after Nature: the value of being natural in the age of marvellous technologies’ and organised by the multidisciplinary synthetic biology research centre BrisSynBio, was a discussion on how ideas about the value of nature and naturalness fit into debates about emerging biotechnologies. (more…)
This blog post was written following the first Beauty Demands workshop. The second workshop will focus on the role of medical professionals in developing, offering and carrying out cosmetic procedures. We are currently calling for papers from graduate students to present at the workshop (deadline 17 April). (more…)
This year, the Council is starting a new project exploring ethical issues around genome editing. In this post, Dr Peter Mills sets out some of the issues and questions that might be considered and calls for contributions to the project. To register your interest in being involved or kept informed about this work, please email genedit@nuffieldbioethics.org
This week the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report of its inquiry into GM foods and the precautionary principle in Europe. The title for the report, noticeably taking its own advice and avoiding the two fatally contested terms ‘GM’ and ‘precautionary principle’, is: Advanced genetic techniques for crop improvement: regulation, risk and precaution. (more…)
Guest post by Dr Anna Middleton, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who spoke at the launch of the Council’s report on biological and health care data.
Developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology and information technology (to name but a few ‘-ologies’) are difficult enough in themselves in terms of understanding and managing their potential future applications. But when they combine and converge in novel ways, they present even greater challenges.
Enter your email address and choose your alerts