An International Summit on Human Gene Editing, co-hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine, the UK’s Royal Society and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, took place Dec. 1 to 3, 2015. We speakers were charged with addressing the scientific and ethical challenges posed by the new accurate and accessible genome … Continue reading »
ethics
The future of conservation
Earlier this year I wrote critically about a New York Times op-ed that proposed making the restrictions on development in wilderness areas more flexible in order to allow for adaptation to climate change. This week the Times published what I think is a much more helpful op-ed on the topic of how we should address … Continue reading »
The murder of journalists puts news media in a quandary
The murders of the U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff by their Islamist captors were trivial horrors in the spiraling calamity that has engulfed Syria and Iraq. Still, to me they were uniquely painful for reasons unrelated to the region’s incomparably greater misfortunes: They were the needless deaths of brave and committed professionals, they pointed … Continue reading »