CGS encourages responsible uses and effecitve governance of human genetic and assisted reproductive technologies

Featured

“Disastrous” Embryo Editing Results Deliver “Restraining Order” for Heritable Genome Editing

By Katie Hasson | 06.16.2020
Biopolitical Times
Researchers in Kathy Niakin’s lab in the UK have revealed disturbing results for anyone intent on pursuing heritable human genome editing. Their research showed significant unintended “on target” edits.
Human Genetic Modification

Who Among Us Is Valuable Enough to Save?

By Pete Shanks | 06.03.2020
Biopolitical Times
Who should live and who should die? That brutal and generally unspoken question is behind all the eugenic reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of those assaults on decency are obviously racist, or ableist, but others are a little more subtle and arguably at least as dangerous, since the eugenics is somewhat less apparent.

Police killing black people is a pandemic, too

By Osagie Obasogie, The Washington Post | 06.05.2020

Op-Ed

Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash

Pandemics are often thought to be unforeseeable acts of God that emerge suddenly to...

U.S. Federal

Our Commitments to Social Justice and Anti-Racist Work

By Center for Genetics and Society | 06.06.2020
Biopolitical Times
We are in a moment of extreme challenge for each of us and for our country's future – yet again....
Bioethics

Biopolitical Times

COVID-19 and Intimations of Eugenics under the Guise of Bioethics

By Gina Maranto, Guest Contributor | 06.29.2020

Oxford University panjandrum and philosopher Julian Savulescu has spent most of his career advancing positions that push the envelope of...

Bioethics

20 Years After the Human Genome was Mapped, Where Are We?

By Pete Shanks | 06.26.2020

Twenty years ago today – on June 26, 2000 – President Clinton formally announced, with great ceremony, what he...

Human Genetic Modification

Reckoning (or Not) with Racism and Eugenics in Genetics

By Katie Hasson | 06.18.2020

A wave of corporate solidarity statements followed in the wake of resurgent Black Lives Matter protests responding to the recent...

Society

News

China’s massive effort to collect its people’s DNA concerns scientists

By David Cyranoski, Nature | 07.07.2020

A report revealing China’s effort to collect DNA from millions of men to help solve crimes is raising concerns among researchers about privacy and consent. They say people have little control over how their information is used, and probably do...

How making a COVID-19 vaccine confronts thorny ethical issues

By Bethany Brookshire, ScienceNews | 07.07.2020

Henrietta Lacks, from whom the “immortal” HeLa cell line was derived in 1951, without permission or compensation

Ethical concerns abound in the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. How do we ethically test it in people? Can people be...

Society

US Transhumanist Party rocked by furore over “lab-grown human meat” project

By Jonathan Matthews, GMWatch | 07.06.2020

Transhumanists are no strangers to controversy. How could they be when Jeffrey Epstein numbered himself among their longstanding adherents and hefty financial backers? But even by transhumanist standards, the ructions that have just rocked the US Transhumanist Party (USTP) over...

A "Post-Human" Future?

What’s happening in Xinjiang is genocide

By Editorial Board, Washington Post | 07.06.2020

WHAT HAS been known until now about China’s persecution of the Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang province has focused on cultural genocide: concentration camps intended to eradicate their language, traditions and ways of life. This was cruel enough. But...

Other Countries

Video
Future of Genetics | FULL DEBATE | Doha Debates
Bill McKibben and john a. powell discuss “Climate Crisis, Designer Babies, and Our Common Future.”
A Reading and Discussion with George Estreich