Should We Genetically Modify Our Children?
By Jessica Cussins,
Kennedy School Review
| 12. 07. 2015
Now that we have the power to permanently alter humanity, should we?
This was the question at the heart of the International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, D.C., last week, an event co-hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.’s Royal Society. For three days, hundreds of scientists, scholars, and public interest advocates (and thousands others online and at #GeneEditSummit) discussed the scientific, social, ethical, and legal considerations posed by the prospect of making alterations to the human genetic code.
The summit was set in motion with the advent of a new gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. The technique was discovered just three years ago, more than a decade after other gene-editing technologies. Unlike previous methods, CRISPR is cheap and easy to use, and caused an explosion in research and interest. The U.S. National Institute of Health invested more than $80 million in CRISPR in 2014, and nearly 600 papers about the new technique were published by the end of that year.
All of the potential...
Related Articles
Not the species, certainly, but the Institute of that name, which was founded by transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2005 as a research group at Oxford University. According to a recently posted Final Report, its goal was “to pursue the big questions in a transdisciplinary way” by pulling together “researchers from disciplines such as philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and economics.” This evolved before long into the study and promotion of “effective altruism” and “longtermism” as...
By Yelena Biberman and Jonathan D. Moreno, Bioethics Forum | 04.16.2024
A quiet biological revolution in warfare is underway. The genome is emerging as a new domain of conflict. The level of destruction that only nuclear weapons could previously achieve is fast becoming as accessible as a cyberattack.
Now for the...
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...