Tuesday 23 August 2016

When Bioethics Was Told to Get Out of the Way

This time last year, psychologist, linguist and public intellectual Steven Pinker made a bit of splash in the small world of bioethics by telling it, via an op. ed. in the Boston Globe, to get out of the way of science. The specific field of research he had in mind was work on genome editing. I wrote a guest post on the blog of the Centre for Value, Ethics and Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. I was in a bit of a bad mood when I wrote it. But I still think I was right:

https://velimblog.org/2015/08/11/on-not-getting-out-of-the-way-a-reflection-on-steven-pinkers-critique-of-bioethics/

Since then I have been a member of a working group at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, helping to develop a platform report on the ethical issues around genome editing. This report should appear at the end of September. Details of our work can be found here:
http://nuffieldbioethics.org/project/genome-editing/

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