The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is now 25 years old and our anniversary meeting at the Institute for Contemporary Arts on 14 November provided us with an opportunity to take stock of the current state of public bioethics and our place in it. Thankfully, the speakers and attendees demonstrated that bioethics remains an important, interesting and lively field and also that the NCoB has a distinctive place within it. (more…)
We should all know about CRISPR-Cas9 (CC9) by now. We should know, at least, that it is a biological technique that claims to make precise, targeted alterations to DNA (and RNA) sequences in living cells, that it has diffused rapidly through the life sciences and that, as it has done so, it has spawned further variations and refinements. (more…)
This is an edited transcript of a talk given by our Director, Hugh Whittall, at the 2016 Global Summit of National Ethics Committees.
Bioethics has to and does engage important public interests and is in itself a public enterprise. Of course, national ethics committees (NECs) advise policy, but if we see bioethics as a public enterprise that engages public interests then this obviously requires public involvement in a pluralistic fashion, engaging a national and international discourse. That much we all will agree. (more…)
By Kate Harvey, Senior Research Officer, and Ranveig Svenning Berg, Communications Officer
Today, the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games will spring to life with an opening ceremony that promises samba, supermodels, and even the odd sportsperson.
But in the build-up to the Games, the topic which has dominated the sporting press has focused not on the records that might be broken, or the personal bests that might be achieved, but rather on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. (more…)
It’s a longstanding tradition of ours to gather Working Parties together again roughly a year after a report has been published, to review developments since publication, and discuss further opportunities for follow-up. Last week it was time to reunite our Working Party on children and clinical research with a busy year-and-a-bit to look back on. (more…)
It is now three weeks since the UK voted to leave the European Union. This period has been filled with a great deal of anxious and often vituperative debate about the political, economic and social consequences of that decision. What, though, might it mean for bioethics? (more…)
‘Has bioethics contributed to scientific progress?’ and ‘Has bioethics itself progressed?’ These were the two very challenging questions posed by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics at its symposium at the World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics, in Edinburgh in June 2016. The daunting task of addressing these questions (surely not answering them) was given to a panel of four academics working in bioethics: Professor Ruth Macklin, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, USA; Professor Christian Munthe, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Dr Calvin Ho, National University of Singapore and me, Professor Erica Haimes, Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences (PEALS) Research Centre, Newcastle University. (more…)
Boxes packed, talks prepared, Ceilidh moves at the ready – we’re off to Edinburgh this week for the International Association of Bioethics World Congress (aka IAB 2016). (more…)
Last week I had the double good fortune of being invited to Padua to contribute to an intensive short course on the ethics of paediatric research hosted by the University – a beautiful place to visit (especially in May) and a topic very close to my heart. In particular, my hosts asked me to talk about the ‘participatory methodology’ at the core of the Council’s two-year project that culminated in our 2015 report Children and clinical research: ethical issues. Reviewing how we had approached that project, and what we had learned from it, I was prompted to think a little further about whom we try to engage with our work – and why. (more…)
In a very short space of time, new techniques (such as the CRISPR-Cas9 system) have revolutionised possibilities for genome manipulation. Initially, the focus is on myriad research opportunities, but the potential therapeutic, or more radical ‘enhancement’ scenarios, come straight to the fore. (more…)
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