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Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon delivered a keynote address at the Future of Medicine conference, a national health care conference celebrating the convergence of technology, bioethics, population health, and preventive medicine. The event, presented by Centura Health in Denver on May 11 and 12, was attended by hundreds of clinicians, tech entrepreneurs, bioethicists, academics, and trans-disciplinary health care innovators and leaders.
Solomon’s talk focused on emerging biotechnologies and anticipated some of their social, ethical, and policy implications.
“We live in an age of transformative scientific powers, capable of changing the very nature of the human species and radically remaking the planet itself,” she began. “Advances in information technologies and artificial intelligence are combining with advances in the biological sciences, including genetics, reproductive technologies, neuroscience, and synthetic biology, as well as advances in the physical sciences, to create breathtaking synergies. The World Economic Forum has called this period in history, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
While these new powers hold great promise for curing and preventing disease, improving agricultural output, and enhancing quality of life, they also raise many questions – including...