Lunch Seminar: Gene Editing, Psychiatry and moral Bioenhancement Feat. Julian Savulescu

Event Date & Time

September 24, 2019-September 24, 2019 at 11:45 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Location

The Ecumenical Center | 8310 Ewing Halsell


Event Details:
Medical research always carries risk, and this even more true for gene editing, which makes heritable changes. It has the potential to eradicate single-gene diseases, like Huntington’s Disease, in the not-too-distant future, but there are potential trade-offs. One enduring fear is that diversity will be lost as the range of acceptable traits narrows. Whether we should use gene editing in humans is a matter of urgent ethical debate. How we should use it, if we do, raises a series of complex issues that will challenge our agreed ethical principles and regulatory frameworks. Although the technology is in its infancy, the time to start addressing the ethical and regulatory issues is now.

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About the Speaker(s)

Professor Julian Savulescu has held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford since 2002. He has degrees in medicine, neuroscience and bioethics. He directs the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics within the Faculty of Philosophy, and leads a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator award on Responsibility and Health Care. He directs the Oxford Martin Programme for Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease at the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He co-directs the interdisciplinary Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.

In 2017, he joined the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, spending four months per year as Visiting Professorial Fellow in Biomedical Ethics, and Melbourne University as Distinguished International Visiting Professor in Law.

He is a leader in medical and practical ethics, with more than 400 publications, an h index of 63 and over 15, 000 citations in total. He spent 10 years as Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, the highest impact journal in the field, and is founding editor of Journal of Practical Ethics, an open access journal in Practical Ethics.

In May 2014, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bucharest. He was previously the winner of the ‘Thinkers’ category of The Australian’s Top 100 Emerging Leaders awards, presented by the Australian Prime Minister at Parliament House.