bioethics
It’s not creation, but it’s a technical achievement full of promise.
To say that Craig Venter’s latest contribution is garnering hype would be one of the understatements of the year. The paper, whose title begins “Creation of a Bacterial Cell…” was published in the print version of Science on July 2—Daniel Gibson was the first of many authors, Venter the last—but it had already appeared online on May 20 and generated a lot of comment, not least of all by Venter himself. (more…)
A couple of weeks ago I posted some musings about “the self” in anticipation of being on a panel with Steven Pinker (author of The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought) and Noga Arikha (author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours) at Tufts University. The panel, convened by Jonathan Wilson, was titled “The New Biology and the Self,” and what follows was my contribution. The graduate student referred to is Monica Chau of Emory University.
I told a very smart neurobiology graduate student named Monica yesterday that I’d been asked to speak on “The New Biology and the Self.” She said, “What’s the new biology?” I said, “I don’t know, but that’s the least of my problems. What’s the self?” (more…)
Want to make your life better with the help of medical technology? It might be between you, your doctor, and the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Bioethics has become a booming industry, and it goes way beyond conventional medical ethics. But what exactly do bioethicists do? Are they just a bunch of self-appointed moralists who want to tell everybody what to do? Are they representatives of particular churches or religions?
A year or so ago (more…)
Welcome to the Age of Personal Genomics
I had a celebrity sighting in mid-town Manhattan a few weeks ago. It was unmistakable: the unkempt sparse white hair, the glasses slipping a bit on the nose, the eyes intense in conversation, the head leaning into the world—this was James Watson, who 55 years ago, with the late Francis Crick, played around with some cardboard cutouts representing nucleic acids and (with some help from Rosie Franklin’s X-rays) built the strange spiral that changed the world.
What if a stranger could see into your mind?
“A penny for your thoughts,” my mother used to say when I was brooding. As I got on into my teen years, she was less and less likely to get her money’s worth, and–even corrected for inflation and then some–I would probably have gotten even less out of my own kids.
But suppose parents didn’t have to offer even a penny’s worth of bribes? Suppose they could switch on some new technological marvel and know their kids’ thoughts?
