Sailing a close reach, San Francisco Bay. (Image copyright Nathaniel Pearson) A talk at the Clinical Genome Conference resonated with some folks, who suggested sharing…
A human genome, remixed, and gone viral. In a nutshell, that’s the conditionally re-published genome of HeLa cells, which flourish in labs worldwide, but trace…
Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Massachusetts (Image copyright Nathaniel Pearson) A journalist asked me last week to comment on reported plans to sequence — and ostensibly…
In an insightful essay (published in an excellent anthology edited by Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein, which also includes other sources cited in this series…
On 9 March, President Obama issued an executive order to lift hobbling restrictions on embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, George Bush. In…
Two years before Obama’s executive order to rescind limits on stem cell research, Senator Orrin Hatch introduced bill S.812, the ‘Human Cloning Ban and Stem…
The trouble started back in December 2002, when the BBC aired a documentary film that openly probed the tenets of a popular sect. The day…
The same winter that saw controversy over the BBC documentary on Crispian Hollis’s sect, another claim was foisted on the world by another sect, who…
Let’s start with the worn chestnut of identity. Ethicist Robert Williamson has posited ‘that there is a personal right, ethically based, to individuality, autonomy, and…
But in assessing the fear that cloning will lead to eugenics, note that human mate choice is already eugenic. Lest you doubt, take an extreme…