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Katie Hasson, Biopolitical Times
Approaching global governance with the assumption that there is a policy vacuum ignores the large number of countries that already have policies and the near-consensus among them. [Cross-posted at Impact Ethics]
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Giving Tuesday is right around the corner
Is the Center for Genetics and Society in your plans this year? Your donation will ensure that social justice and human rights perspectives and voices are well represented in urgent debates about human biotechnologies — heritable genome editing, international commercial surrogacy, eugenics past and present, and more. Mark your calendar for Giving Tuesday, December 1!
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Pete Shanks, Biopolitical Times | 11.12.2020
Proposition 14, the California ballot initiative that continues and increases public financing for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, seems to have narrowly succeeded. The slim margin could reflect widespread concerns about the state’s looming budget deficit, and about effective oversight. Reform is now in the hands of the legislature but requires 70% supermajorities. Will the politicians step up to the plate?
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Pete Shanks, Biopolitical Times | 11.11.2020
Several titles have caught our attention lately, three published in the past few weeks and two more announced for early 2021. One question we’ll be asking as we read: Will their shared focus on the "CRISPR babies" drama obscure what's fundamentally at stake in the debate about heritable genome editing?
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“The surprise for me is really that the momentum towards developing heritable genome editing has somehow gotten so strong without consideration of these possible social consequences, without anything like sufficient support given for those broad societal debates that so many people call for, and without acknowledging some of the basics facts of the case, including the existing policy situation,” says co-author Marcy Darnovsky.
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Megan Molteni, Wired | 10.29.2020
The DNA-cutting tool has been hailed as a way to fix genetic glitches. But a new study suggests it can remove more than scientists bargained for. [Links to the policy paper published last month in The CRISPR Journal.]
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HERITABLE HUMAN GENOME EDITING | EUGENICS | DISABILITY RIGHTS | RACISM | ASSISTED REPRODUCTION | DATA AND PRIVACY | VARIOUS |
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HERITABLE HUMAN GENOME EDITING |
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G. Owen Schaefer et al., Trends in Biotechnology | 11.04.2020
A number of scientists around the world knew in advance about the experiment resulting in the birth of the first gene-edited babies. Scientists have a responsibility to reveal such activities, so an international governance mechanism for reporting unethical gene editing experiments should be established.
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Marilynn Marchione, AP | 10.29.2020
In more than half of the cases, genome editing caused significant unintended changes in human embryos, such as loss of an entire chromosome or big chunks of it.
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Erik Parens, Aeon | 11.10.2020
Progressive optimists assert that the new field of social genomics can be used to combat racial and other inequities — but it could also be used by conservatives to excuse them.
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Jeffrey Mervis, Science | 11.09.2020
Jason Richwine, an independent public policy analyst, has been appointed as deputy undersecretary of commerce for standards and technology. His doctoral thesis maintained that Mexican and Hispanic immigrants have IQs below those of white people and that “the difference is likely to persist over several generations.”
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Tate Ryan-Mosley, MIT Technology Review | 11.02.2020
Jewish communities are facing a wave of anti-Semitic online ads, internet-fueled conspiracy theories like QAnon, and widespread racist disinformation.
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Aubrey Clayton, Nautilus | 10.28.2020
Statistics is a human enterprise subject to human desire, prejudice, consensus, and interpretation.
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Laura Hercher, The Beagle Has Landed | 10.27.2020
In this podcast, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University, discusses disability as an identity and the conflicts raised by genetic testing and counseling.
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Shobita Parthasarathy, Nature | 11.02.2020
Review of The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans by Anjali Vats, who argues that the tentacles of racism are institutional, embedded, and endemic.
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Alexandra Witze, Nature | 10.29.2020
Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s six-figure donation is a step towards addressing racial injustice in the sciences.
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Katie Strick and Lucy Holden, Evening Standard | 11.10.2020
More women have frozen their eggs during the pandemic than ever before, but success rates remain vanishingly low.
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Katy Fallon, The Guardian | 11.11.2020
The UN Special Rapporteur on racism and xenophobia has called for a moratorium on the use of certain surveillance technologies. Digital technologies can be unfair and regularly breach human rights, despite a misconception that biosurveillance technology is without bias.
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Gregory Barber, Wired | 11.03.2020
Dozens of districts have purchased thermal cameras to monitor fevers that can also identify students and staff. It’s unclear how many districts will turn on the facial recognition features they’ve now purchased.
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Justin Jouvenal and Spencer S. Hsu, The Washington Post | 11.02.2020
The protester might never have been identified, but an officer found an image of the man on Twitter and investigators fed it into a facial recognition system, court documents state. They found a match and made an arrest.
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Christa Lesté-Lasserre, New Scientist | 11.04.2020
“There is sexist ideology in Western culture that may have slowed our ability to recognise females as hunters in the past,” says Randall Haas, one of 10 co-authors of a study published in Science Advances that was sparked by the unearthing of a young woman’s bones, buried 9000 years ago in the Andes mountains.
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