Perspectives

Powerful new “gene editing” techniques have put the prospect of genetically modified human beings on the foreseeable horizon. Should we use these tools to improve the human species? Are they needed to prevent the transmission of genetic diseases? Would manipulating the genes of future children and generations open the door to new kinds of discrimination, inequality, and eugenics? Marcy Darnovsky unpacks the controversies that have erupted in recent months about how we should — and should not — use gene editing tools, and explores the technical, social, and ethical stakes of these imminent decisions.

This webcast explores the new techniques of synthetic biology and gene editing, and their capacity to redesign nature, from seeds to insects to people.

The technologies are being rapidly developed and robustly funded, in most cases well ahead of safety assessments, public engagement, and social oversight. What does this mean for people and the planet – and what can we do about it?

• Dana Perls, Friends of the Earth
  • GMO's: Myths vs Reality
• Ricarda Steinbrecher, EcoNexus
  • What Has Changed?
• Jaydee Hanson, Center for Food Safety
  • Redesigning Nature with Crispr and Gene Drives
• Pete Shanks, Center for Genetics and Society
  • GMO 2.0 Human Experimentation

Moderated by Marcy Darnovsky, Center for Genetics and Society

If you were unable to join us, or would like to see the webcast again, click below to watch the event in its entirety.

You can find written replies to some of the questions and comments that were submitted by participants here. 

A new survey has found implicit biases in medical students that may explain why black patients are sometimes under treated for pain, with some students believing that black people feel less pain and have thicker skin than white people.

The resurgence of race as biological concept is one of the most pressing social justice challenges raised by recent developments in genetic science and technologies. Dorothy Roberts, noted professor of law at Northwestern University,  discusses her efforts to communicate this trend, and to place it within broad social and political contexts in the United States, in her recently published book Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. Dorothy is interviewed by UC Berkeley associate professor of bioethics David Winickoff.

Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben talks about why he wrote Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), how it was received, and what this experience might tell us about communicating and organizing in support of practices and policies addressing human biotechnology, both domestically and internationally. Bill also shares his thoughts about ways in which the issues of climate change and human biotech can be understood as facets of a single dynamic involving the technological manipulation and transformation of the natural world, including plants, animals, humans and ecosystems. Bill is interviewed by Center for Genetics and Society associate executive director Marcy Darnovsky.