Tag: biotechnology
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Gene drive and grey squirrels: Science and media
At the beginning of January 2019 an article, entitled “Accelerating Evolution” appeared in The Biologist, a journal published by the Royal Society of Biology (The Biologist 66(6) p18-21). The authors, Bruce Whitelaw and Gus McFarlane, work at the Roslin Institute in Scotland which was involved with the creation of Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996, coincidentally the occasion of…
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A road called ‘gene drive’ and the road to ‘gene drive’: Trials and tribulations of media analysis
As people might know, I enjoy doing media analysis of emerging biotechnologies, from cloning to gene editing and beyond. I have lately become fascinated with something called ‘gene drive’, a new genetic engineering technology that was brought to public attention around 2014/2015 at the confluence of two ‘events’: the outbreak of Zika and advances in CRISPR-Cas9…
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Poo and puns: Recent representations of faecal microbiota transplants in English language news media
This post, by Carmen McLeod, Brigitte Nerlich and Rusi Jaspal, has recently been published on the Microbiology Society Blog. We reblog it here with permission. *** Bacteria, germs, poo…these are words that normally don’t evoke images of health and happiness. The relationship between humans and bacteria is often understood as a combative one. Bacteria are…
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Heritable Genome Editing: National and international governance challenges and policy options
This blog post has been co-authored with Achim Rosemann (University of Exeter). A shorter and slightly different version has been published by the BioMed Central ‘On Society’ Blog. *** Germline gene editing has become a hot topic in science and in society, after one Chinese scientist edited embryos in 2018, an experiment that a Russian…
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Inspecting Pandora’s box: Promises and perils of gene drives
This is a guest post by Aleksandra Stelmach, University of Nottingham, Institute for Science and Society. *** Some years ago the sociologist Alan Petersen noted that metaphors of new biotechnologies not only express hopes and fears about their use and misuse, but that they also set the agenda for debate and action. Thus, metaphors not…
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Talking about gene drive
In 2019 I became a co-investigator on a project led by Dr Sarah Hartley at the University of Exeter. The project was funded by The Wellcome Trust and was called: “Talking about gene drive: An exploration of language to enable understanding and deliberation in Africa, Europe, North America and Australasia”. The team The international team…
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New genetics and society: A retrospective
I am in a collecting mood at the moment [I have updated this collection/blog post on 17 January 2022 and on 8 October 2024]. When I heard that an article (with Carmen McLeod and Rusi Jaspal) on faecal microbial transplants had finally been accepted by New Genetics and Society, I began to count back and…
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Scientists call for a moratorium on heritable genome editing. What do they want?
This is a guest post by Jim Dratwa and Barbara Prainsack. Jim Dratwa, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., and Free University of Brussels’ Centre on Law, Science, Technology & Society. e: jim.dratwa@vub.ac.be Barbara Prainsack, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, AT and Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, King’s College London, UK. e:…
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Gene drive communication: Obstacles and opportunities
The other day I was talking to two people about various developments in science. Both are interested in science, but they are not natural scientists. I mentioned ‘gene drives’. Their faces went blank. I then said: “it’s something like the gene editing of a whole population of creatures, such as insects, for example. This can…
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Making Science Public: End of year blog round-up, 2018
2018 is the year that the Leverhulme Trust funded programme ‘Making Science Public’ really ended (today our director Sujatha Raman is submitting the final report to the Leverhulme Trust). My last post on the programme, entitled ‘Making Science public: six years on’, mentioned one of the most important milestones of our work, namely the publication with Manchester…
Making Science Public 