Category: GMOs
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Asilomar 1975 and 2025: Speech acts and the performance of responsibility
On 1 August 2026 Yonatan Chemla and Christopher A. Voigt published a report in Trends in Biotechnology, entitled “Responsible biotechnology: An analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties”. This caught my attention, because, just over ten years ago, I wrote a blog post about the first Asilomar conference held in 1975 entitled ‘Ta(l)king responsibility’. And, of…
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Post-Brexit gene editing regulation
Some of us are old enough to remember the controversies surrounding genetically modified or engineered foods and crops that raged in Europe (which included the UK) around the turn of the millennium. Some of us are even old enough to remember debates about recombinant DNA in the seventies (for those who don’t, I recommend Matthew…
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Genetically modified mosquitoes and creatively unmodified metaphors
Last week genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes were released in Florida. One news item reported the event as follows: “The British company Oxitec released a cloud of hundreds of millions of genetically modified mosquitoes to study how to control their reproduction and thus stop the spread of dengue, Zika, malaria, etc.” (Entrepreneur, 4 May, 2021). What type of genetic…
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Mutant words
I was listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on this sunny morning of the 19th of December when I heard the phrase ‘mutant strain’, used in reference to a new strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which is apparently spreading in the South East. My ears twitched of course, as they did with ‘mutant…
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Gene drives and societal narratives
Some days ago, I came across an interesting virtual conference (HT @Sarah_A_Hartley) about gene editing which includes a session on ‘societal narratives’. I have written quite a bit about societal narratives of gene editing, but more recently I became involved in the issue of ‘gene drive’, that is, “a system of biased inheritance in which…
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The microbe/gene drive communication confusion
Last week I wrote a post about how genetic modification and/or gene drive are used when managing disease transmitting insects. I want to come back to this topic today and talk about another difference, which, yet again, confused me. I hope that these efforts of disentangling stuff also help other people trying to understand and…
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The GM/gene drive communication confusion
The other day, I was at the airport waiting for a plane back to the UK, when I noticed on twitter that there was some kerfuffle going on about a field trial in Brazil intended to eliminate disease carrying mosquitoes, which had had, it seems, some unintended consequences (see study). Here is a short summary:…
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Genome editing in the news: Trying to keep up
Gene/genome editing has been much in the news recently and it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay on top of new developments. The last two weeks alone have seen major announcements, which I shall briefly list in this blog post. This leads me to a question that has been troubling me: How does one do…
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The colours of biotechnology
I have recently been musing about images used to make science public and wondered what images are out there for synthetic biology. I knew that in the past cloning was visually represented by ‘Dolly the sheep’ or ‘armies of little Hitlers’, nano found its visual incarnation in nanobots and fantastic voyage, but what images would…
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Who is responsible for GM moths?
This is a joint post with Sarah Hartley, Making Science Public Research Fellow What is the role of the public in science? Should public concerns about scientific innovation be taken into account when regulating new technologies? Are some types of concerns more valid than others? These are fundamental questions about the governance of innovation, and the answers…