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Category: ethics

Not sure if this is real or still vaporware yet. But it IS inevitable. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when”. And we’re most likely not going to be able to regulate it much, either. If an embryo or fetus is not a human, then parents have the right to do anything they want to it. You might think that this is going to result in eugenics, like erasing melanin genes and starting a race against the fictitious “white genocide”. You’re right. But if you think that’s as bad as it’ll get, think more creatively. What happens when poor parents get paid to implant “willing servility” genes into their unborn children, in order to pay bills. The future is now. Cyborgs will not destroy humanity, but humanity itself might. What kinds of rights can be written into law to prevent this kind of extortion, that won’t also grant fetal personhood and end up derailing abortion rights? It’s going to be a bumpy ride, folks, buckle up!

A Chinese researcher claims he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month, and with DNA he says he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.

If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.

A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and risks harming other genes.

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And so it begins…

HONG KONG (AP) — A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life. If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics. A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes. Many mainstream scientists think it’s too unsafe to try, and some denounced the Chinese report as human experimentation.

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https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=P-wiCEov7oQ&u=/watch?v=GzGmxPEiGWY&feature=share

Michael B. Fossel, M.D., Ph.D. (born 1950, Greenwich, Connecticut) was a professor of clinical medicine at Michigan State University and is the author of several books on aging, who is best known for his views on telomerase therapy as a possible treatment for cellular senescence. Fossel has appeared on many major news programs to discuss aging and has appeared regularly on National Public Radio (NPR). He is also a respected lecturer, author, and the founder and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Anti-Aging Medicine (now known as Rejuvenation Research).

Prior to earning his M.D. at Stanford Medical School, Fossel earned a joint B.A. (cum laude) and M.A. in psychology at Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in neurobiology at Stanford University. He is also a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy. Prior to graduating from medical school in 1981, he was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship and taught at Stanford University.

In addition to his position at Michigan State University, Fossel has lectured at the National Institute for Health, the Smithsonian Institution, and at various other universities and institutes in various parts of the world. Fossel served on the board of directors for the American Aging Association and was their executive director.

Fossel has written numerous articles on aging and ethics for the Journal of the American Medical Association and In Vivo, and his first book, entitled Reversing Human Aging was published in 1996. The book garnered favorable reviews from mainstream newspapers as well as Scientific American and was published in six languages. A magisterial academic textbook on by Fossel entitled Cells, Aging, and Human Disease was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press.

Since his days as a teacher at Stanford University, Fossel has studied aging from a medical and scientific perspective with a particular emphasis on premature aging syndromes such as progeria, and since at least 1996 he has been a strong and vocal advocate of [telomerase therapy]] as a potential treatment of age-related diseases, disorders, and syndromes such as progeria, Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, cancer, and other conditions. However, he is careful to qualify his advocacy of telomerase therapy as being a potential treatment for these conditions rather than a “cure for old age” and a panacea for age-related medical conditions, albeit a potential treatment that could radically extend the maximum human life span and reverse the aging process in most people. Specifically, Fossel sees the potential of telomerase therapy as being the single most effective point of intervention in a wide variety of age-related medical conditions. His new book, The Telomerase Revolution, (BenBella, 2015) gives a careful explanation of aging, age-related diseases, and the prospects for intervention, including upcoming human trials.

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Privacy advocates have raised concerns about patients’ data after Google said it would take control of its subsidiary DeepMind’s healthcare division.

Google, which acquired London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind in 2014, said on Tuesday that the DeepMind Health brand, which uses NHS patient data, will cease to exist and the team behind its medical app Streams will join Google as part of Google Health.

It comes just months after DeepMind promised never to share data with the technology giant and an ethics board raised concerns over its independence.

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Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.

Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.

Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”

Research house Gartner Inc. identified do-it-yourself biohacking as one of five technology trends—others include artificial intelligence and blockchain—with the potential to disrupt businesses. The human augmentation market, which includes implants as well as bionic limbs and fledgling computer-brain connections, will grow more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion, by 2025, as industries as diverse as health care, defense, sports, and manufacturing adopt such technologies, researcher OG Analysis predicts. “We’re only at the beginning of this trend,” says Oliver Bendel, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northwestern Switzerland who specializes in machine ethics.

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Today on The Neuroethics Blog is a post by Adina L. Roskies, Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Cognitive Science Program and Helman Family Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College, entitled “What can neuroscience tell us about ethics?”

By Adina L. Roskies Image courtesy of Bill Sanderson, Wellcome Collection What can neuroscience tell us about ethics? Some say nothing – ethics is a normative discipline that concerns the way the world should be, while neuroscience is normatively insignificant: it is a descriptive science which tells us about the way the world is. This seems in line with what is sometimes called “Hume’s Law”, the claim that one cannot derive an ought from an is (Cohon, 2018). This claim is contentious and its scope unclear, but it certainly does seem true of demonstrative arguments, at the least. Neuroethics, by its name, however, seems to suggest that neuroscience is relevant for ethical thought, and indeed some have taken it to be a fact that neuroscience has delivered ethical consequences. It seems to me that there is some confusion about this issue, and so here I’d like to clarify the ways in which I think neuroscience can be relevant to ethics.

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