Pete Shanks
Pete Shanks, MA, attended Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and moved to California in the mid-1970s. He has been active in a range of local and international political movements, while mostly making his living in the publishing industry, especially on the production side; he enjoys the craft of bookmaking. Appalled by the eugenic possibilities of biotechnology, he has consulted with the Center for Genetics and Society since its earliest days. He is the author of Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed (Nation Books) and a regular contributor to Biopolitical Times.
Biopolitical Times
Syrian hamster, by John Stockla,
CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The high-profile debates over gene editing, especially...
A Eugenics Society poster (1930s) from the
Wellcome Library Eugenics Society Archive via Wikimedia
On a Saturday afternoon in May...
Heritable human genome editing (HGE), proponents and opponents perhaps surprisingly agree, should not proceed without public backing. In modern societies...