Remembering George Annas (1945-2025)
The Center for Genetics and Society mourns the loss of long-time colleague George Annas, who died on May 30. A remembrance at Bioethics Today calls George an “unwavering defender of human rights” and “a brilliant communicator, an intellectual pioneer, a polymath, devoted to justice for all, and a key figure in crossing boundaries in bioethics.” He is described as “a visionary health law pioneer” in an obituary posted by the Boston University School of Public Health, where he was the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics and Human Rights.
George was a prolific author, editor, speaker, organizer, and in his later years, stand-up comic. He wrote or edited more than 20 books and nearly 400 articles on bioethics, health law, and human rights. In 1996, he co-founded Global Lawyers and Physicians, whose website states that “[l]awyers and physicians, by virtue of their privileged position and their commitment to life, health, social justice and equality, have special obligations to all people.”
George was deeply concerned about the eugenic risks of reprogenetic technologies. In 2001, Global Lawyers and Physicians, Our Bodies Ourselves, and CGS co-organized Beyond Cloning: Protecting Humanity from Species-Altering Procedures, which drew 140 participants to Boston University. Conference organizers and speakers called for a global ban on genetic procedures that fundamentally change the nature of the human species; George argued that “individuals, countries, or corporations” have no rights to genetically alter the human species.
In an address that year to the World Conference against Racism, George sounded a dire alarm about the prospect of using genetic modification to create “posthumans”:
[G]iven the history of humankind, it is extremely unlikely that we will see the posthumans as equal in rights and dignity to us, or that they will see us as equals. Instead, it is most likely either that we will see them as a threat to us, and thus seek to imprison or simply kill them before they kill us. Alternatively, the posthuman will come to see us (the garden variety human) as an inferior subspecies without human rights to be enslaved or slaughtered preemptively.
In 2002, George co-authored “Protecting the Endangered Human: Toward an International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable Alterations” (American Journal of Law & Medicine) with Lori Andrews and Rosario Isasi. That landmark article warned,
“If we legalize heritable gene editing, we greenlight inequality, ableism, and class bias—baked into biology. This is not progress; it's techno-eugenics.”
Over the next 20+ years, George frequently collaborated with CGS to confront misuses of human biotechnologies and oppose heritable genome editing. In 2018, he signed the CGS-organized “Civil society statement to the organizers of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing” in response to the “CRISPR babies” scandal. In 2020, he co-authored “Geneva Statement on Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Need for Course Correction.” George participated as a member of CGS’ Missing Voices Initiative Working Group from 2021-2023, including speaking on a panel at CGS’ online symposium Genetic Justice from Start to Summit in advance of the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing. In 2024, he endorsed the “Social Justice and Human Rights Principles for Global Deliberations on Heritable Human Genome Editing” developed by CGS’ Gender Justice and Disability Rights Coalition on Heritable Genome Editing.
For more on George Annas’ life and work, see obituaries at the Washington Post and Eaton Funeral Homes.