Project Syndicate
From gene drives to insecticide nets, here’s how biotechnology is confronting the malaria epidemic
Mosquitoes and the malaria parasite have survived as long as they have by constantly adapting to new conditions. Now, growing ...
Latin America can’t let its COVID crisis go to waste – it needs a structural overhaul
The pandemic has highlighted two long-standing structural weaknesses in Latin America. The first is pervasive and chronic shortcomings in state ...
Viewpoint: Lack of international cooperation could perpetuate the pandemic crisis for years
World leaders now have an opportunity to seal the deal on a global framework that puts international cooperation above vaccine ...
Viewpoint: Coronavirus exposes why the UN is unfit to mobilize international cooperation, says Council on Foreign Relations head
The United Nations has fallen far short of its goals to “maintain international peace and security,” “develop friendly relations among ...
Viewpoint: Human challenge trials – volunteers intentionally infected with COVID-19 – are ‘uninformative, unnecessary and unethical’
Deliberately infecting volunteers with SARS-CoV-2 to test the efficacy of vaccine candidates is unnecessary, uninformative, and unethical. … [O]ne prominent ...
Biomedicine, vaccines and antibiotics dramatically better human lives, but critics raise specter of ‘dangerous viruses’ and bioterrorism
Although continued innovation will further improve people’s lives, it will also give rise to new threats. … True, better diagnostics, ...
Hype and agroecology: Is ‘low input’ farming better for the environment and economy?
[Editor's note: Henry Miller, physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s ...
Crops raised for industrial meat production contribute to unsustainable agriculture practice
The way we eat in the industrialized world is unhealthy, unjust, and unsustainable. Far too much of the meat we ...
Potentially lifesaving GMO-derived medicines face regulatory roadblocks
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Obtaining medicines from plants ...
GE can help address California’s drought
The United Nations has called drought the “world’s costliest natural disaster,” both financially, imposing an annual cost of $6-8 billion, and in ...
GM mosquitoes can control mosquito menace, if politics doesn’t block development
Mosquito-borne diseases kill millions of people annually, and cause suffering for many more. It takes only one bite from a disease-carrying ...
Princeton bioethicist/activist Peter Singer makes case to soften opposition to GMOs, Golden Rice
When genetically modified crops were first developed in the 1980’s, there were grounds for caution. Would these crops be safe ...
‘Good for nature, good for you’? Not so fast: Breaking down the myths of organic farming
(Summary) "Organic fruits and vegetables were, on average, no more nutritious than their cheaper conventional counterparts," Henry Miller said on ...
Gene pool rules: The ethics of human evolutionary engineering
The following is an excerpt. For thousands of years, humans have used genetic engineering to control the evolution of plants ...
How to genetically engineer humans, safely
In a post for Project Syndicate, biomedical ethics professor Maxwell Mehlman outlines the challenges of safely genetically engineering humans. Among ...
GM reactionaries deny science
The following is an excerpt: After the cultivation of more than a billion hectares of GM crops worldwide – and ...
Personalized medicine’s perverse economics
In pharmacogenetics, genetic typing is used to determine a patient's likely response to drugs, and create a personalized drug regime ...