A recording of my talk (and introduction to the bioethics of genome editing) at the Education Session from the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy’s 21st Annual Meeting (Chicago May 16, 2018) is now available thanks to ASGCT.
Category Archives: Bioethics
New paper out for Ethics & Politics: “CRISPR Pigs, Pigoons and the Future of Organ Transplantation”
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.
New open-access editorial for the Journal Bioethical Inquiry on Ethics and Reproduction: “Rearranging Deck Chairs on a Sinking Ship?”
In the spirit of a “Bioethics Forecast,” at the beginning of 2017 I made some predictions for what would keep us bioethicists busy for the rest of the year (Camporesi 2017). Of course, as with most predictions, most of mine missed the mark. As 2017 comes to a close and we prepare to turn the page and welcome the new year, it is worth looking back at some of them to reflect on the main bioethics, and biopolitics, features of this year. Of the ten forecasts I made at the beginning of 2017, in my role as Associate Editor for Ethics and Reproduction I will comment only on those pertaining to reproductive ethics. I will then conclude with some more general reflections on the state of bioethics. Disclaimer: many of the topics below are skewed towards the United Kingdom, the country where I work.
The full content of this editorial is available open access here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11673-018-9840-2
