Designer Genes

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All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!

Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.

This is a past event that happened on Saturday, December 4, 2021 at 2:30pm EST.

Supernatural and other circumventions of the natural process of conception have been an abundant wellspring for magical, mythological, and religious narratives. It was held that the widowed queen of an Egyptian pharaoh could pull his posthumous sperm into her womb to create a child. The Olympian god Zeus could procreate in all sorts of ways, including swooping down as a shower of gold into a young womb. His daughter Athena sprang full-born from his head; his son Dionysus from his thigh. And it was the wind of the Holy Ghost that inseminated a certain young virgin.

Inevitably, technologies entered the process of conception and pregnancy bringing with them a growing set of choices regarding gender and other attributes of offspring. The wish for greater certainty and enhanced selectivity have now entered many phases and aspects of generation. Sperm, eggs, and genes may be shared, selected, bought and sold. Polygenic screening of gene variants in embryos mandates additional consciousness, choices, and unavoidable ethical puzzles.

The experts in this roundtable will engage the issues arising from 21^st century options of sequencing and profiling once imagined as the realms of the gods and the mandates of Nature.

Participants:

Nathaniel Comfort

Professor, History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

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Nathaniel Comfort is Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His interests lie in the histories of genetics, eugenics, genomics, and biomedicine, as well as bioethics. He is the author of The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001) and The Science of Human Perfection: How... read more! »

Henry Greely

Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law, Stanford University
Director, Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford University

Henry T. (Hank) Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law; Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics; and Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. He specializes in ethical, legal, and social issues arising from the biosciences. He is a founder and a past President of the... read more! »

Robert Klitzman

Professor, Psychiatry, Columbia University
Director, Bioethics Program, Columbia University

Robert Klitzman, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Joseph Mailman School of Public Health, and the Director of the online and in-person Bioethics Masters and Certificate Programs at Columbia University. He has written over 150 scientific journal articles, nine books, and numerous chapters on critical issues... read more! »

Vardit Ravitsky

Professor, Bioethics Program, School of Public Health, University of Montreal
President, International Association of Bioethics
Senior Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Vardit Ravitsky is Full Professor at the Bioethics Program, School of Public Health, University of Montreal and Senior Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is President of the International Association of Bioethics and Director of Ethics and Health at the Center for Research on Ethics. She is a 2020 Trudeau Foundation... read more! »