Gregory E. Kaebnick, white man with brown hair and beard

Hastings Center News

Kaebnick Elected Hastings Center Fellow

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Gregory E. Kaebnick, a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center and editor of the Hastings Center Report, was elected a Hastings Center Fellow on December 8, 2023.

Hastings Center Fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed scholarship and public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology.

Kaebnick explores questions about the values at stake in developing and using biotechnologies and, particularly, in questions about the value given to nature and human nature. He has testified before Congress on ethical issues concerning synthetic biology and served on a National Academy of Sciences committee, Gene Drive Research in Non-Human Organisms: Recommendations for Responsible Conduct.

He is currently the principal investigator of a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, on the ethics of causing the extinction of a species by means of genome editing. Past NSF-funded projects examined the values at play in the impact assessment of emerging technologies and the use of public engagement to shape policy decisions about the use of genome editing in the shared environment. Other past projects he has led, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, have considered ethics of synthetic biology, compared how bioethics differs from environmental and agricultural ethics in its analysis of the human relationship to nature, and considered how citizens learn and make decisions about science policy issues (and how their “civic learning” contributes to democratic society). He has also worked on ethical issues associated with paternity testing and animal research ethics,

He is the author of Humans in Nature: The World As We Find It and the World As We Create It (Oxford, 2014). He was an associate editor for the fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (MacMillan, 2014) and editor of several editions of Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Bioethical Issues, (McGraw-Hill, 2013-2019).

Kaebnick received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Minnesota and his BA in religion from Swarthmore College.Learn more about Gregory E. Kaebnick