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.

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Publications

By Pete Shanks, San Francisco Chronicle | 09.26.2005

Baseball fans around the nation have been conducting their own straw poll about human enhancement, and they don't like it...

By Pete Shanks, San Jose Mercury News | 07.24.2003

The birth of Louise Brown in Oldham, England, on July 25, 1978, was front-page news all over the world. Time...

By Pete Shanks, San Francisco Chronicle | 07.23.2003

Twenty-five years ago, the use of in vitro fertilization to conceive the first "test-tube" baby provoked an important debate --...

In the News

By Pete Shanks, Alternet | 04.08.2013

There's a buzz now around bringing species back from the dead. There's even a spiffy new name for it: "de-extinction."...

By Pete Shanks, Junior Scholastic | 02.27.2012

Thanks to advances in technology, scientists can extract cells from an animal and implant them into a surrogate mother. If...

By Pete Shanks, GeneWatch (Sep-Oct 2009) | 10.22.2009

Pet cloning is a terrible idea -  and, we now know, an extremely unpopular one. Cloning endangered species is equally...

Biopolitical Times

Claudine Gay at her Inauguration as Harvard President
Charlotte Hysen/Governor's Press Office (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

On January 2...

Coded Bias is on Netflix; the trailer is
also at The Algorithmic Justice League

A few weeks ago, Marc Andreessen...

Artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic biology, and gene editing are powerful technologies that are being developed with remarkable speed and are...