- Hastings Center News
Yes, We’re Animals: Why We Should Face Up to This Reality Now
Read the PostHastings Center NewsIn an age of new biotechnologies, from gene editing to neural enhancement, is there a tension in the idea that humans have special value because they’re somehow different or exceptional in nature? Dwelling on the idea that there’s something extraordinary about being human – and ignoring our kinship with life on our planet – is becoming a problem, says Melanie Challenger, an award-winning British writer and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics who has been a visiting scholar at The Hastings Center in November.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Living Good and Healthy Lives on a Changing Earth: What Should Bioethics Do?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhat does it mean to live well on a warming planet? And as the climate changes, how might health care, education, and other sectors support, or obstruct, our ability to respond? The answers to these profound, and profoundly bioethical, questions will critically influence human well-being in this century and beyond. A group of scientists, educators, and bioethicists convened at The Hastings Center recently to consider these questions and begin an interdisciplinary conversation on how bioethics might address the challenges posed by climate change.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
How Can Bioethics Help Mitigate Climate Change? Hastings Center Explores Options
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We Should Be Concerned About Athletes Having to ‘Dope Down’
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Caster Semenya and the Challenges of Sports Brackets
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIf virtuous perfection of natural talents is what sports is all about, sports needs more people like Caster Semenya, the South African runner. But she is now ineligible for competing in middle distance events unless she takes medication to suppress her naturally high testosterone levels. Is this fair?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Rationality as Understood by a Neanderthal
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New Project: Public Deliberation on Gene Editing in the Wild
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Might Chimpanzees Have Legal Rights?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn May 8, the New York Court of Appeals denied an appeal to have two captive chimpanzees, Kiko and Tommy, recognized as legal persons with the right to bodily liberty and released to a chimpanzee sanctuary. The Court of Appeals allows only about 5 percent of appeals, so the legal outcome was not surp...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Chimpanzees: Persons or Things?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLast month, a group of 17 North American philosophers (myself included) filed an amicus curiae brief with the New York State Court of Appeals on behalf of Kiko and Tommy, two captive chimpanzees. The brief, informally known as “Chimpanzee Personhood: The Philosophers’ Brief,” supports a legal a...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Good Sport: Why Our Games Matter and How Doping Undermines Them
Read the PostHastings Center NewsIn the wake of Olympic doping scandals and just before the Winter Games in Pyeongchang in February, a new book by Hastings Center President Emeritus Thomas Murray explores the use of biomedical enhancements in sport and the ways in which they can subvert the values that are fundamental to athletic co...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Responsible Science in a Perilous Time: Hastings and Union of Concerned Scientists Join Forces
Read the PostHastings Center NewsClimate change, nuclear proliferation, and the advancement of gene editing and other transformative biotechnologies pose enormous global challenges. How can we promote responsible science, good governance, and opportunities for public engagement at time when anti-intellectualism on the rise and socie...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Genetics Symposium Draws Journalists from Around the World
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Josephine Johnston Tackles Gene Editing in “Prestigious Speaker” Series
Read the PostHastings Center NewsUsing gene editing to modify genes responsible for devastating illnesses such as cystic fibrosis seems overwhelmingly desirable, but could there be unintended consequences? Might the ability to select for certain traits in human embryos increase discrimination or merely reflect it? These were two of ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Fix the Planet, or Change the Creatures In It?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPossibly as many as half of the coral reefs that existed 100 years ago have been destroyed, sometimes by removing them, covering them up, or blowing them up, but mostly just because of climate change, which is gradually heating the water and making it more acidic. The solution everyone who cares abou...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Natalie Kofler: What Role Should Humans Play in “Editing Nature”?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsNatalie Kofler, a postdoctoral research scientist at Yale University, visited The Hastings Center earlier this summer to explore the ethical questions surrounding the use of gene editing technologies in the environment. Kofler shared insights from the Editing Nature summit, which brought together a m...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Climate Agreement: Understanding, and Leveraging, Public Opinion
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Is it Ethical to Use Genetic “Evolutionary Rescue” for Conservation?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsHastings Center research scholar Gregory Kaebnick participated in a multidisciplinary workshop at the University of Montana in Missoula on May 25 – 26 to examine the potential for using genome editing to conserve plants and animals that are threatened with extinction. The meeting addressed scie...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
In New Frankenstein Edition, Hastings Scholar Asks, What Do We Owe Our Creations?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsWhat do scientists and engineers owe to their creations? What responsibility do they bear for harms that their creations cause? How does being responsible for our creations change us? These are the central questions in an essay by Josephine Johnston, The Hastings Center’s director of research, in ...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Scholar Participates in Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate on De-Extinction
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“Off Ramps Rather than Barricades” in Governance of Emerging Technologies
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Being at Two with Nature and Mosquitoes
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhen Woody Allen said he was “at two with nature,” perhaps he had in mind insects that sting or bite. Who can argue with that, and who hasn’t taken a swat at one in self-defense? Right now the creature we would like to get rid of is one common species of mosquito called Ades aegypti. Unfortunat...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Challenging Evolution?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWe have long had the ability, we humans, to work outside the bounds of evolution. Dairy cattle, maize, and all sorts of dog breeds attest to that. It is unlikely that natural evolution alone would have produced these things. They depended on human intervention. However, in the past, the scope of huma...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Are Arguments about GMO Safety Really About Something Else?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe scientific consensus that food containing genetically modified organisms is safe seems ever stronger, yet the social controversy about GMOs seems only to grow as well. “Unhealthy Fixation,” a long article published this summer in Slate and reporting on what author Will Saletan says was cl...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
On a Radioactive Pig and Pope Francis
Read the PostBioethics Forum Essay“If you look through the red-tinted glass, you will see the radioactive pig,” said the director of animal laboratories at my university–let’s call her Susan–near the start of my tour of the facility. There on a concrete floor, within a steel cage, was a large solitary sow, lying on her side...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
New in Skin Care: Natural and GMO
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAt the end of April, the biotech firm Amyris announced that it was launching its own line of skin emollient under the brand name Biossance. The product is based on a hycrocarbon known as squalane that Amyris produces from sugarcane using genetically modified microorganisms and has sold to cosmetics m...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Sacred versus Synthetic? Nature Preservationism and Biotechnology
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOne of the long-term contributions of Earth Day is that it offers a regular, semi-official reminder that a sense of the sacred is a vital part of environmentalism. The spirit of John Muir lives on in the notion of “Respect for the land” that was emphasized in the famous Keep America Beautiful pu...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
A Moratorium on Gene Editing?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAn article in the New York Times last week suggests that the genetic engineering of humans is only just around the corner. A recently developed gene editing tool known as CRISPR/Cas9 has finally made it possible to easily and accurately make genetic alterations to human cells, which could make it pos...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
GM Mosquitoes: Risks and Emotions
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayFor several years, a British company called Oxitec has been proposing a strategy for controlling a species of mosquito, Aedes aegypti, that humans have accidentally carried from Africa to other parts of the globe, thereby also spreading a risk of dengue fever and other diseases for which A. aegypti i...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Altering Nature to Preserve It
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPerhaps the biggest challenge in talking about something like de-extinction is simply being clear on what it is you’re really talking about. Emerging technologies can be surrounded with so much hoopla that one can lose sight of what the technologies actually accomplish.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
OHRP’s Dangerous Draft Guidance
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn October, the federal Office for Human Research Protections issued a “Draft Guidance on Disclosing Reasonably Foreseeable Risks in Research Evaluating Standards of Care.” It follows the controversy that erupted in 2013 over the SUPPORT study of oxygen therapy for premature babies. The draft g...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Nature Isn’t What It Used To Be
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIs the end in sight for wilderness? A recent opinion piece in the New York Times, by the science journalist Christopher Solomon, says it is. “There’s a heresy echoing through America’s woods and wild places,” writes Solomon. “It’s a debate about how we should think about, and treat, ou...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Synthetic Chromosomes
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA team of scientists announced this week that it had successfully created one of the sixteen chromosomes found in yeast cells, marking a meaningful step forward in that part of genetic engineering dubbed synthetic biology. This is the first time an entire chromosome has been synthesized. Moreover, th...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
What’s at Stake with Genetically Modified Organisms
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA remarkable set of essays appeared recently in Grist, a nonprofit dedicated to “dishing out environmental news and commentary,” about the warring claims over genetically modified organisms. In the inaugural piece last July, the author, Nathanael Johnson, said his goal was to proceed with humil...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
De-Extinction: Could Technology Save Nature?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis past November, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature declared the western black rhinoceros of Africa, last seen in 2006, officially extinct. It also concluded that most other rhino species are in danger, even “teetering.” Yet at the same time, over the past year, some scient...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
X Marks Evolution: The Benefits of the “Indeterminate Sex” Passport Designator
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAustralia passed legislation in September giving transgender and intersex passport holders the option to identify themselves with an X for “indeterminate sex.” Navi Pillay, the United Nation’s high commissioner for human rights, called it “a victory for human rights.” Although other nations...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Australia’s Passport to Gender Confusion
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Dr. Oz Can’t Afford Me
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe first time the Dr. Oz show called me, I was simply too tired to deal. The story of Caster Semenya — the track athlete whose sex had been called into question — had hit the international news the week before, and since then, as an expert on atypical sex, I had done 25 media interviews....Read the Post
Humans and Nature
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