Biopolitical Times

The Center for Genetics and Society blog highlights the latest developments in the social, political, and ethical implications of human biotechnologies, with contributions from staff, fellows, consultants, and guest authors.

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book cover reading  Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West

book cover photo from University of Nebraska Press

How responsible are we for the supremacist legacies left behind by our ancestors?


Julie Carr’s Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) is a meticulous exploration of her family’s history of complicity with eugenics and her own mission to combat this legacy. Carr, the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, uses an interdisciplinary storytelling approach to provide readers with a...

Biopolitical Times

The New York Times and Serial Productions recently released a five-part podcast series, The Retrievals, which has topped podcast charts and sparked conversation––even Hillary Duff is listening to it. The podcast is produced with the typical “true crime” hallmarks––suspenseful music, powerful dialogue, and cliffhangers punctuated by jarringly cheery advertisements. But its exploration of the intersections between cultural dismissals of women’s pain and unjust structures in the fertility industry directs our focus toward the systemic rather than the salacious.

The...

Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash

This blog post is adapted and expanded from comments Alana Cattapan delivered on the panel “Social, Ethical, and Legal Considerations Raised by IVG” at the workshop “In Vitro Derived Gametes as...

Poster for King of Clones (Netflix documentary) via Wikipedia

Back in the early years of this century, the most prominent rogue in biotech was a South Korean scientist named Hwang Woo-Suk. He became one of the best-known scientists in the...