Category Archives: Bioethics

Obsession. I’ve been obsessed with many things in my life, from specific women to sundry topics. But I’ve never known obsession until I had a child. Perhaps others are not like me, but the monomaniacal need to know as much as you can about …

Read more

As they say, read all about it. I’m rather ambivalent. 23andMe has a business rationale to go in this direction, so I don’t begrudge them their decision. The problem, at least from a legal perspective, is that they’re providing medica…

Read more

An interview with paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer:
This raises one more question: Could we ever clone these extinct people?
Science is moving on so fast. The first bit of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was recovered in 1997. No one then could have be…

Read more

An interesting comment:
“If you add copies of a gene the result is not always good because of dosage effects (Down Syndrome is an extreme case of this on the smallest chromosome).” [From my post, -Razib]
As a father of a child with Down syn…

Read more

In the comments:
And yes, species concepts are much more fuzzy in many cases. Were mice to hold their own Olympics, they might well have learned (if slightly furry) discussions about whether musculus/domesticus/castaneus should compete in the same eve…

Read more

The New York Times has an article up on a new I.O.C. ruling on who can compete as a woman. Basically they look at testosterone levels. This seems a different tack than cases where women were banned from competing as women because they had a male karyto…

Read more

Evolution’s winner. Real headline.

In the mid-2000s two British biologists of some public note attempted to revive or resuscitate the good name of eugenics, Richard Dawkins and Armand Leroi. My own suspicion is that this emerges in part from a …

Read more

Nature has a Peopling the planet issue out that is worth reading. Lots of the features are free to the public, but Chris Stringer’s comment is not. Though there is some science in the comment, a lot of it is about normative concerns. Not what is,…

Read more

There’s news about the Woolly Mammoth cloning attempts again. This gets floated every few years, and nothing has come of it…yet. I assume with enough money and time invested it will come to fruition. And whoever invests their time and energy and gets a successful return will probably get really famous, really quickly. But I’ve […]

Read more

Get ready for PGD, the acronym for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. We don’t really talk about “test tube babies” anymore. It’s “IVF,” and as American as apple pie (OK, perhaps as Israeli as falafel). Here’s the Ngrams result: It’s just not that big of a deal anymore. But take a look at the order articles in The […]

Read more

A comment below clarified my thinking in one particular area: is widespread genetic screening going to result in a reconsidering of the idea of ‘engineering’ society? I realize now that in a comparative scenario this is ridiculous. The majority of healthcare expenditure is near the end of life, not the beginning. In 17 years the […]

Read more

In earlier discussions I’ve been skeptical of the idea of “designer babies” for many traits which we may find of interest in terms of selection. For example, intelligence and height. Why? Because variation on these traits seems highly polygenic and widely distributed across the genome. Unlike cystic fibrosis (Mendelian recessive) or blue eye color (quasi-Mendelian […]

Read more

I’ve mentioned this before, but I thought I’d pass on the latest report on MaterniT21, the prenatal noninvasive Down Syndrome test. Currently it has a $235 copay for women with insurance. As of now only a few percent of the ~5 million pregnancies in the USA are subject to amnio or c.v.s. This procedure may […]

Read more

For several days I’ve gotten referrals from message board discussions about the case of Trent Arsenault. Trent is a “free sperm donor” (see the link for the details). For various financial reasons he can’t adhere to all the regulations which sperm banks are subject to. I don’t dismiss the concerns out of hand, but I […]

Read more

I have discussed the reality that many areas of psychology are susceptible enough to false positives that the ideological preferences of the researchers come to the fore. CBC Radio contacted me after that post, and I asked them to consider that in 1960 psychologists discussed the behavior of homosexuality as if it was a pathology. […]

Read more

I don’t give much thought to chimeras, so this editorial in Nature took me unawares (OA): The legacy of Doctor Moreau:
Innumerable mice and other animals have been engineered in past decades to express a human gene and model specific aspects of h…

Read more

In the comments below, John Howard asks in relation to me releasing my genotype into the public domain: “I’m curious if this means you give permission to be cloned, or for someone to reproduce with you, by making gametes from your genome. Do yo…

Read more

17/17
Razib Khan