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Threat, Promise, and the Need for Regulation: AI Is Here
Pete Shanks, Biopolitical Times | 06.23.022
Artificial intelligence is transforming biotechnology industries, from assisted reproduction and genomics to animal technologies and human simulation. While some developments prove promising, lack of regulation and financial conflicts of interest threaten to exacerbate potential social harms.
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Biopolitical News & Views Summer Schedule
CGS will publish one issue per month in July and August of this newsletter Biopolitical News & Views.
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Conference Presentations by CGS Communications Consultant Emma McDonald
A PhD candidate in Theological Ethics at Boston College, Emma presented in early June on racial bias in maternal healthcare and qualitative interviews with Catholic women using reproductive technologies at annual conferences for the College Theology Society and Catholic Theological Society of America.
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GENOME EDITING | ASSISTED REPRODUCTION | STEM CELLS
EUGENICS | AGRICULTURE | SURROGACY360 | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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Half in UK back genome editing to prevent severe diseases
Ian Sample, The Guardian | 06.22.2022
A survey commissioned by the Progress Educational Trust found that 53% of people support the use of human genome editing to prevent children from developing serious diseases, while only 20% support its use to make “designer babies.”
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Side Effects May Include … A Completely New Hair Color?
Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 06.22.2022
An experimental gene therapy for cystinosis not only improved symptoms of the disease, but it also altered patients’ hair color, pointing to the still-unknown role that the CTNS gene plays in the body.
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Fertility Frontiers: What Is a 'Permitted' Embryo in Law?
Antony Starza-Allen, Progress Educational Trust | 06.13.2022
At a Progress Educational Trust event considering potential changes to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, Robin Lovell-Badge, Julian Hitchcock, and other speakers discussed whether the concept of the 'permitted embryo' should remain or be changed to allow heritable genome editing.
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Good and evil on the new frontier
Kit Wilson, The Critic | 06.10.2022
To keep up with rapid biotechnological change, we need a more holistic ethical vision—one that begins every scientific challenge with a simple question: “what is the ultimate good?”
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What happens when your conception begins with deception?
Kudrat Wadhwa, The Verge | 06.14.2022
Genetic testing has revealed a flood of fertility fraud cases, but victims often have no legal recourse to hold physicians accountable. Some victims and legal advocates are working to develop state-level legislation to criminalize fertility fraud.
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Sperm Is a Focus of Start-Ups Looking to Boost Fertility
Fiorella Valdesolo, WSJ Magazine | 06.08.2022
In response to mounting evidence that sperm quality is declining, new start-ups are offering home sperm tests and prenatal supplements for men. But there is little evidence to support the efficacy of these supplements.
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Where science meets fiction: the dark history of eugenics
Adam Rutherford, The Guardian | 06.19.2022
In the simplicity of Mendel’s peas is a science which is easily co-opted, and marshalled into a racist, fascist ideology, as it was in the US, in Nazi Germany, and in dozens of other countries. To know our history is to inoculate ourselves against it being repeated.
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White Nationalists Want to Reclaim Nature as a Safe Space for Racists
Tess Owen, Vice | 06.15.2022
National parks are regarded by these white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups as not just free from environmental pollution but also remote, unclaimed spaces “free of contaminants”—meaning, non-white people. Conversely, urban areas or diverse parts of the country have often been regarded as “cesspools” or “shitholes"—hubs of moral and social decay.
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The Simple Antidote to the Poisonous ‘Race Science’ Revival
Dan Samorodnitsky, The Daily Beast | 06.12.2022
As gatekeepers of the scientific community, publishers should recognize that race science is both bad research and actively harmful. They can reduce the spread and potency of this work by simply refusing to publish it.
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New York fund apologizes for role in Tuskegee syphilis study
Jay Reeves, The Associated Press | 06.11.2022
Starting in 1935 and extending almost 40 years, the Milbank Memorial fund covered funeral expenses for Black men who died of syphilis in the Tuskegee study, in an attempt to persuade the families to consent to autopsies to study the effects of the disease. Now, the fund is publicly apologizing to descendants for its role.
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Victims of Forced Sterilization in California Are Fighting for Reparations
Ray Levy-Uyeda, Truthout | 06.08.2022
Survivors of eugenic sterilization in California prisons are now eligible to apply for compensation from the state, but the burden is on them to prove they were sterilized. Lack of access to medical records from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation makes it difficult for women to even apply for compensation, let alone receive it.
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If you've read this far, you clearly care about the fight to reclaim human biotechnologies for the common good. Thank you!
Will you support CGS by making a donation today?
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