This paper has been published for a special issue titled “From Genome Editing to New Reproductive Technologies: Ethical and Social Issues” of the journal Ethics & Politics, XX, 2018, 3, pp 35-52. ISSN: 1825-5167 guest-edited by Dr Maurizio Balistreri.
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the possible biofuture imagined by George Church, in which we are able to grow humanized organs in pigs and edit them with CRISPR genome editing technologies so that they are free of porcine endogenous retroviruses that pose a risk for human transplant, and juxtaposes it with the biofuture imagined by Margaret Atwood in her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. I adopt Ari Shick’s critique of speculative bioethics to show how an over-emphasis on the urgency of the experiments may overshadow other non-medical solutions to the problem of shortage of organs for transplantation. In the end, I draw some reflections on the role that science fiction and speculative fiction play in the construction of biofutures for bioethics.
The full paper can be accessed here.
Dr Silvia Camporesi 