Commercialisation and the moral obligation to create 'designer' babies
Although the word was not actually used (or at least I did not hear it), this was a polemic making the case for 'eugenics'...
Professor John Galloway was previously a Volunteer Writer at BioNews, and was previously a Trustee at the charity that publishes BioNews, the Progress Educational Trust (PET). He is Head of the Dental Team Studies Unit at the Eastman Dental Hospital, Expert Adviser to the Comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre (a partnership between University College London and the National Health Service's University College London Hospitals Foundation Trust), and an Associate of the Centre for the History of Medicine. He is also Oral and Dental Lead for UK Biobank and for the National Institute for Health Research's Central and East London Comprehensive Clinical Research Network. He originally studied Theoretical Physics at King's College London and at the University of Sheffield. He went on to posts at Nuffield College, Wolfson College and New College at the University of Oxford, and was Sir Henry Royce Research Fellow at the University of Manchester's School of Medicine. He has been Senior Administrative Officer at the Medical Research Council, Director of Public Affairs for the Cancer Research Campaign (now subsumed into Cancer Research UK), and Secretary to the Nuffield Foundation's Committee of Enquiry into the Education and Training of Personnel Auxiliary to Dentistry.
Although the word was not actually used (or at least I did not hear it), this was a polemic making the case for 'eugenics'...
Why do we think we can learn anything useful (other than about twins themselves) from twins? It might be thought that the most important thing about them is their 'twinliness', the one attribute denied to non-twins. Science thinks otherwise...
It is not given to many to overturn a central dogma of scientific faith. But last year, John Gurdon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for doing it...
Perhaps fortuitously, I started to read Maxwell Mehlman's book at the same time as Roy Porter's 'A short history of madness'. It was then difficult not to muse on what Jonathan Swift might have made of 'transhumanising scientists'...
We inherit our biological identity at conception but our humanity in a process beginning at birth. Nothing reminds us of this more than the rites and rituals surrounding birth and the way our rights change as we stop being a part of our mother and become a 'person'...
Immanuel Kant's 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made' is probably my favourite saying. And where better to start reviewing this book? After all, what is 'eugenics', in whatever guise, but an attempt to straighten out the human race?...
David Shenk's book sets out its stall as an exploration and explanation of the nature of 'genius'. You'll be encouraged to know that we can all be one if we really want; hence the title. I'd like to suggest, though, that it really tells us something about the nature of 'science'. Namely that despite how science likes to represent itself, it is manifestly not an objective enterprise...
'Take what you want', said God, '- and pay for it'. Or, to put it another - rather longer winded - way: society rarely if ever advances to the point where some new technology can be seen as an unmixed blessing. Robert Winston has further expanded God's nugget of wisdom into an entire book...
A feature of science, perhaps a characteristic feature, is that over time some of its better 'ideas' have come increasingly to be seen as actual 'things'. From being (only) conceptual they become physically real with a definite measurable size and a three-dimensional structure. A process of materialisation is in evidence...
Molecular biologist, (Lord) David Phillips once described to me, rather ruefully, a talk on genetics he had just given in the church hall in Banbury. Having been invited to talk on anything he chose, he sensibly asked who were likely to be in the audience. When told, mostly farmers and their families, he immediately plumped for genetics. If anyone would either be interested in genetics or have a basis of understanding it would surely be them. Selective breeding and inherited characteristics w...
Join our list to stay up-to-date on all the latest developments in the fields of human fertility and genomics.