Sandy Starr

Deputy Director

Sandy Starr is Deputy Director of the Progress Educational Trust (PET). Together with PET's Director Sarah Norcross he produces the charity's public events, and he works on the charity's flagship publication BioNews. He is also an author and public speaker who has addressed MPs in the UK Parliament on the subject of human embryo research, debated the morality of genetics on The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, been interviewed about mitochondrial donation on the BBC World Service programme Newshour and in the book Legalising Mitochondrial Donation, and appeared as a guest on the Sunrise Paper Review on Sky News. He has written about genome editing in the British Medical Bulletin, in the European Journal and in Microbiology Today, and has written about the role of genetics in education in Teachwire.Sandy has worked with the British Society for Genetic Medicine on the development of guidelines concerning prenatal genetic diagnosis, both in relation to ethical issues in general and in relation to cancer susceptibility in particular. He has been a producer of the annual Battle of Ideas festival, a lecturer at the annual Living Freedom residential school, and a judge at the Debating Matters sixth-form debating competition. He was previously a member of the Ethics Advisory Board of the world's largest autism research project, narrated project-related videos and contributed to related journal articles. He has served on the Editorial Board of the charity Autistica, he was a member of the founding editorial team of the pioneering current affairs publication spiked, and he spent several years as a film critic for The Sun newspaper's TV Mag supplement.