|
|
|
European Convention Continues to Ban Germline Editing
Pete Shanks, Biopolitical Times | 10.17.2022
The Council of Europe treaty that explicitly bans heritable genome editing in 29 ratifying countries has been reexamined in light of new technological developments. The results couldn’t be clearer: Heritable genome editing––that is, for the purposes of procreation––is still banned.
| | | |
|
|
Celebrating Loretta Ross
Emily Galpern, Biopolitical Times | 10.19.2022
Last week, Loretta Ross was named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. As one of the founders of the reproductive justice movement, Ross has a long history of grassroots organizing that centers the voices and well-being of women of color.
| | | |
|
|
The Next Gene Editing Summit Begins to Come into Focus
Pete Shanks, Biopolitical Times | 10.07.2022
With almost no time for human rights and social justice perspectives to weigh in on human heritable genome editing, will the March 2023 gene editing summit wind up being an opportunity for advocacy in favor of adopting HGE, disguised as dialogue?
| | |
|
GENE THERAPY | GENOMICS | ASSISTED REPRODUCTION
EUGENICS | SURROGACY360 | ANIMAL TECHNOLOGIES
| |
|
A Bold Effort to Cure HIV—Using Crispr
Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.05.2022
A clinical trial will test whether a one-time infusion of an experimental CRISPR therapy can cure HIV. Gene-editing molecules target two regions in the HIV genome important for viral replication but avoid “off-target” edits to the human genome.
| |
|
Genetic test for cancer is less accurate for Black and Asian people
Grace Wade, New Scientist | 09.29.2022
A new study shows that genetic tests that are supposed to predict the efficacy of certain cancer treatments aren’t as effective for people of African or Asian ancestry, in part because genetic databases mostly contain DNA from white people of European descent.
| |
|
Will Proposed Bills Reverse Michigan’s Hostile Surrogacy Laws?
Ellen Trachman, Above the Law | 10.05.2022
Under current Michigan law, compensated surrogacy is a crime. Recently introduced legislation would, if passed, decriminalize it. It would also establish a regulated and protected path for non-compensated surrogacy.
| |
|
Counter the weaponization of genetics research by extremists
Jedidiah Carlson, Brenna M. Henn, Dana R. Al-Hindi, and Sohini Ramachandran, Nature | 10.19.2022
“Efforts to claim the superiority of some people on the basis of genetics have no scientific evidence. Ultimately, we as scientists need to ensure that our analyses are conducted and presented to underscore — not undermine — the biological reality of our shared humanity.”
| |
|
We, The People Did Next To Nothing
John Kendall Hawkins, CounterPunch | 10.14.2022
Ken Burns’ documentary series explores U.S. government failures to intervene in the Holocaust, the indifference of many Americans to reports of atrocities, and the resonance between Nazi eugenics and U.S. policies of forced sterilization and segregation.
| |
|
Philadelphia issues apology for Holmesburg Prison experiments
Ximena Conde, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 10.06.2022
Philadelphia apologized for experiments conducted on mostly Black men incarcerated in the city’s now-inactive Holmesburg Prison. From 1951–1974, prisoners were deliberately exposed to herpes, radioactive isotopes, and poisonous chemicals used in the Vietnam war.
| |
|
How Nature contributed to science’s discriminatory legacy
The Editors, Nature | 09.28.2022
Nature is examining its own history of publishing articles featuring offensive and harmful research that promoted eugenics and colonization: “They contrast starkly with the journal’s current goal of fostering equity, diversity and inclusion.”
| |
|
How U.S. Textbooks Helped Instill White Supremacy
Dana Goldstein, The New York Times | 09.26.2022
A new study of American history textbooks from the 1800s to the 1980s reveals how Northern publishers and universities were responsible for spreading an enduring ideology of white supremacy and Black inferiority, in part through the eugenics movement.
| |
|
Spread This Like Wildfire!
Jedidiah Carlson, Science for the People | 09.26.2022
The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto demonstrated how genetic science has become grist for the mill of far-right conspiracy theories and propaganda materials. How can the scientific community better organize to counter weaponized science?
| | |
|
|
How Ukraine’s Surrogate Mothers Have Survived the War
Maria Varenikova and Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times | 10.16.2022
Despite wartime challenges, Ukrainian surrogacy agencies are resuming operations. Compensation has helped some surrogates and their families flee to safer areas, but the surrogates themselves face new dangers in an ethically complex occupation.
| |
|
Are rats with human brain cells still just rats?
Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 10.14.2022
Is it ethical to humanize the brains of non-human animals through organoid transplantation? Julian J. Koplin argues, “we do need to start thinking about whether this could have any follow-on effect for the moral status of the research animal.”
| |
|
Gene-edited sheep offer hope for treatment of lethal childhood disease
Robin McKie, The Guardian | 10.09.2022
Using gene-editing, researchers produced sheep with the faulty gene that causes the lethal, inherited Batten disease in children. Experiments with enzyme treatments on the sheep may eventually help develop treatment for children with the disease.
| |
|
The CIA Just Invested in Woolly Mammoth Resurrection Technology
Daniel Boguslaw, The Intercept | 09.28.2022
The CIA’s venture capital firm has invested in several biotechnology companies with the hope of steering global biological phenomena that impact “nation-to-nation competition” while enabling the United States “to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards” for its use.
| |
|
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?
| | | | | | |
