Chair of Trustees
Professor Robin Lovell-Badge is Chair of Trustees at the Progress Educational Trust (PET), and is also Group Leader in Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics at the Francis Crick Institute. Major themes of his work include sex determination, the role of Sox genes in development of the early embryo, the nervous system and the pituitary, and the biology of stem cells within these tissues. In 1990, his laboratory discovered the Y-linked testis-determining gene Sry, and sex determination remains a focus of his current research. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and is very active in public engagement and policy work around stem cells, genetics and genomics, human embryo and animal research, and the ways in which science is regulated and disseminated.
Robin originally obtained his PhD in Embryology at University College London. After postdoctoral research in Cambridge and Paris, he established an independent laboratory at the Medical Research Council's Mammalian Development Unit. He was the recipient of the 1995 Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the 1996 Amory Prize awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 2008 Feldberg Foundation Prize, and the 2010 Waddington Medal awarded by the British Society for Developmental Biology. He is a member of the Committee on Human Genome Editing of the USA's National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, and he was an organiser of the landmark International Summits on Human Genome Editing which took place in Washington in 2015 and in Hong Kong in 2018. He has been awarded a CBE 'for services to genetics, stem cell research and the public understanding of science'.
The recent Nuffield Council on Bioethics report 'Genome Editing and Human Reproduction: Social and Ethical Issues' has been both welcomed and criticised...
The problem of fertility preservation for girls and women undergoing cancer treatments has been a subject of research for many decades. The recent study by McLaughlin and colleagues from Professor Evelyn Telfer's lab at the University of Edinburgh, UK, is
As Chinese scientists report the first gene editing of human embryos, is a moratorium on such practice justified?...
A response to the open letter to the UK Parliament by Dr Paul Knoepfler...
Earlier this year, a paper claimed to have found cells, called ovarian stem cells, in the adult ovaries of both mice and humans. These cells could apparently be grown in large numbers in the lab and could retain the ability to give rise to eggs. A new study finds no evidence for the existence of germline progenitors able to produce eggs in postnatal ovaries. Is a lack of evidence sufficient to win the argument?...
I am all for challenging dogma, but to do so requires robust evidence and carefully drawn conclusions. In the case of Professor Jonathan Tilly's much-trumpeted study on stem cells in ovaries that can give rise to eggs, I feel that both were missing...
Austin Smith and I, with support from Peter Lawrence, gave interviews to Pallab Ghosh for BBC News where we raised several issues about the peer review and editorial processes of high-profile journals dealing with stem cell research papers. We went as far as saying that some high-quality research is effectively being vetoed from publication by a few powerful scientists, in some cases to deliberately to stifle their competition. Moreover, these journals have also published some papers that hav...
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