Contraception by WiFi
Two years ago, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates was visiting the Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the biggest biomedical engineering lab in the world. Bob Langer is a world...
View ArticleEthics in a Time of Ebola
Of all the calamities that a society can experience, war included, plague is probably the most frightening and socially disruptive. In the late 14th century the Black Death killed 30–50% of Europe’s...
View ArticleMarried at First Sight
In the United States and Denmark, a reality TV show called Married at First Sight has been an unexpected hit. In what the production company bills as “an extreme social experiment”, three couples meet...
View ArticleMars Mission Bioethics 101
All Trekkies are familiar with unavoidable ethical dilemmas in deep space. Now a Dutch group called Mars One is seeking to create them by sending four volunteers to establish a settlement on Mars in...
View ArticleThe Bio-Brick Revolution
A small American start-up company recently raised nearly half a million dollars through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in order to use synthetic biology to create “sustainable natural lighting”...
View ArticleWhen Do We Become Autonomous?
I am used to controversy, but sometimes you do get surprises. The hot button issues of bioethics – abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, genetically modified foods – always generate passionate...
View ArticleThe Science of Persuasion
After years of discussion, the British House of Commons has approved the creation of embryos with genetic material from two women and one man by a substantial majority – a vote of 382 to 128. The...
View ArticleA Fresh Look at the Pill
If there is one request by patients that is universally spurned by doctors, without any fear of being labelled paternalistic, it is for performance-enhancing steroids. Extensive research confirms that...
View ArticleBorn to Be Bad
The father of modern criminology, the 19th century Italian sociologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), believed that criminality was genetically determined. “Born criminals” could be detected by the...
View ArticleGermline Tinkering Sparks More Controversy
The single most controversial development in biology in 2015 is a relatively cheap, easily manipulated technology for modifying the human genome. Called Crispr, this tool allows scientists to “edit”...
View ArticleI Recognise Your Face
Imagine that you are a pastor of an American megachurch. You need to track the attendance of your flock for spiritual and financial purposes, but your records are always inaccurate. How do you hook up...
View ArticlePinker Takes on Bioethics
Every once in a while a column about bioethical quandaries ought to dust off the handbook of first principles. Why do we need bioethics anyway? No bioethics, no quandaries. Not just dusted off, but...
View ArticleLife in the Fridge
What would the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal think of cryonics — the business of freezing people until scientists can revive them? Given his scepticism and his...
View ArticleThis Little Piggy Went to Market
The invention of the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR is a game-changer for genetic engineering, making the removal or insertion of DNA sequences relatively easy and inexpensive. The key paper...
View ArticleWill IVF Keep Us Young?
With nations around the world failing to reproduce themselves, policy wonks now realise that too few children could be worse than too many. Without children, populations age rapidly; there are too few...
View ArticleRoyal Paternity Tested in the Modern Age
Even when they are centuries old, royal paternity disputes are fascinating. DNA studies of the recently discovered bones of Richard III suggest that the entire Plantagenet dynasty may have been...
View ArticleA Bizarre Dilemma from Sweden
The political and policing problems of allowing hundreds of thousands of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan to plod into Western Europe tend to overshadow the difficulties of...
View ArticleAdventures on the Dark Side
The British press is a fathomless mine of lurid but thought-provoking explorations of the dark side of the human condition. Recently it featured a passionate romance between a 51-year-old British...
View ArticleGlobal Catastrophic Risk
I have not been blessed with a refined taste in cinema, with my favourite movie franchise being the Terminator series, especially the second and third in which Arnie is in peak form. Alas, there’s not...
View ArticleMasters or Slaves of AI?
In the 19th century and for a good part of the 20th century, many people feared that humanity was destined to become lapdogs of bloated industrialists. The world would be divided between the haves and...
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