Making Science Public

Tag: biotechnology

  • Synthetic embryos: Science, communication, clarification

    Synthetic embryos: Science, communication, clarification

    Earlier in the month (June, 2023) I saw some headlines saying things like “Scientists say first synthetic human ’embryo’ created” or “First reported synthetic human embryo sparks ethical concerns, creates questions” or “Synthetic human embryos created for first time using no eggs or sperm”. These headlines appeared soon after an exclusive article on the matter…

  • Understanding metaphors in the life sciences – a book review

    Understanding metaphors in the life sciences – a book review

    I recently wrote a review of a fascinating little book, Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences, by Andrew Reynolds. It appeared as part of the rather excellent series Understanding Life, published by Cambridge University Press and should be read in conjunction with another book in the series by Kostas Kampourakis entitled Understanding Genes, which came…

  • Making Science Public 2021: End of year round-up of blog posts

    Making Science Public 2021: End of year round-up of blog posts

    We are coming to the end of a another pandemic year, and time seems to expand endlessness towards an uncertain horizon. That means quite a few of my blog posts this year were still devoted to covid and the pandemic, but I also wrote about genetics, climate change and some other incidental topics. As usual,…

  • Post-Brexit gene editing regulation

    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…

  • Genetics and genomics – when metaphors begin to matter

    Genetics and genomics – when metaphors begin to matter

    I remember in the not so distant past standing in the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge admiring the huge sequencing machines and chatting about public engagement with colleagues before giving a talk about genomics and metaphors. I also remember writing some things about gene editing and metaphor. In my mind all this related to basic…

  • Minimal genomes, maximal assumptions

    Minimal genomes, maximal assumptions

    This is another guest post by Massimiliano Simons who is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of philosophy and moral sciences at Ghent University. He is also a member of the Working Group on Philosophy of Technology (WGPT) at KU Leuven, Belgium. *** Ten years ago the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the birth of…

  • Gene drives and Trojan horses: A tale of two metaphor uses

    Gene drives and Trojan horses: A tale of two metaphor uses

    I was reading a recent article on gene drive entitled “Engineering bugs, resurrecting species: The wild world of synthetic biology for conservation” and came across this sentence about a so-called ‘Medea drive’: “This genetic Trojan Horse could then be used to spread elements that confer susceptibility to certain environmental factors, such as triggering the death…