Why were we caught unawares, and why we need a long-term project to edit the human germline — The first CRISPRed babies have been born in China, and from all the noise of the past few days my takeaway is that this inevitable development has caught us all shamefully unprepared. The story began Sunday evening with an article in the MIT Tech Review describing experiments by a scientist…

So this post is mainly a response to this excellent piece by Dr. Arjun Raj. This isn’t exactly a rebuttal (despite what the title says), but just some thoughts I wanted to develop on, especially since the original post has been rattling around in my head for a while now…

How and why we should get rid of author lists in scientific publications — About a month ago, Steven Burgess, conducted a Twitter poll asking if biologists would consider making the lists of authors that accompanies every scientific publication, alphabetical. Unsurprisingly, I and 670 other scientists voted against this proposal. i. the problem In the biological sciences, authorship of scientific, peer-reviewed articles is perhaps the single biggest…

It’s been three days now since the current US administration issued its new, far-reaching immigration controls. Among the first hit were multinational companies, Silicon Valley and scientific institutions, all of which rely on an international, multi-cultural workforce. As scientists, we know that academic life means a lot of travel, and…

How science can deal with the post-truth world. — The legitimisation of falsehood is the defining phenomenon of the ‘post-truth’ world we live in today, and this was perhaps most visible in the Brexit and Trump campaigns of last year. For scientists, this new post-truth world stands as a stark repudiation of everything we value: truth, rationality, logic, evidence…

A conversation with George Church — In my first article, I talked about the recent GP-Write proposal and highlighted what I thought were key questions that needed answering. I was pleasantly surprised, a couple of days later, to receive an email from George Church providing some counter-arguments and answers. …