Who's Advising the Government on Human Genetics?
By Alice Maynard,
BioNews
| 06. 29. 2015
Untitled Document
I served on the Human Genetics Commission (HGC) as a lay member from 2006 to 2012, and found exploring new developments in this area fascinating. On one hand, excitement - the push to a future of opportunity; on the other, uncertainty - the risk to a society we know and trust. I am forever grateful to the HGC for helping me understand my visceral response to some new developments - the 'yuck factor', as it has been so picturesquely called - getting past that to recognise the real opportunities and risks that such developments created.
Read more...
Related Articles
By Evelina Johansson Wilén, Jacobin | 01.18.2026
In her book The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson describes pregnancy as an experience marked by a peculiar duality. On the one hand, it is deeply transformative, bodily alien, sometimes almost incomprehensible to the person undergoing it. On the other hand...
By Daphne O. Martschenko and Julia E. H. Brown, Hastings Bioethics Forum | 01.14.2026
There is growing concern that falling fertility rates will lead to economic and demographic catastrophe. The social and political movement known as pronatalism looks to combat depopulation by encouraging people to have as many children as possible. But not just...
By Paula Siverino Bavio, BioNews | 01.12.2026
For more than ten years, gestational surrogacy in Uruguay existed in a state of legal latency: provided for by law, carefully regulated as an exception, yet without a single birth to make it real.
That situation changed with the arrival...
By Andrew Gregory, The Guardian | 01.11.2026
Google has removed some of its artificial intelligence health summaries after a Guardian investigation found people were being put at risk of harm by false and misleading information.
The company has said its AI Overviews, which use generative AI to...
