Showing results for "Ethics and Engineering" in Health & Wellness

"It's the animal in us," we often hear when we've been bad. But why not when we're good? Primates and Philosophers tackles this question by exploring the biological foundations of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality.In this provocative book, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that modern-day evolutionary biology takes far too dim a view of the natural world, emphasizing our "selfish" genes.

In The Rights of Mice, Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear, takes listeners inside the war between science and anti-vivisection raging across the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its great educational institutions, Harvard and MIT. As animal rights activists attempt to push through city council an ordinance restricting the use of animals in laboratory testing, leaders in the science and medical communities brace for a fight.

In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos - as dramatic a development in genetics as the cloning of Dolly the sheep was in 1996. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.

This gripping narrative explores today's scientific pursuit of immortality, with exclusive visits inside Silicon Valley labs and interviews with the visionaries who believe we will soon crack into the aging process and cure death. We live in an age when billionaires are betting their fortunes on laboratory advances to prove aging unnecessary and death a disease that can be cured.

In the near future, developments in bio-enhancement technologies will not only alter how we make a living, communicate, and interact with each other, but will offer direct and precise control over our own physical and mental states. People will be able to sculpt their own selfhood over time, reshaping their bodies, augmenting their cognition, micromanaging their emotions and moods, and reconfiguring their character and personality. In this captivating audio series from Michael Bess, you’ll explore the promise and peril of tinkering with human bodies and identities.

In 2018, the first genetically modified babies were reportedly born in China, made possible by the invention of CRISPR technology in 2012. This controversial advancement overturned the preexisting moral consensus, which had held for over 50 years before: While gene editing an adult person was morally acceptable, modifying babies, and thus subsequent generations, crossed a significant moral line. John H. Evans here provides a meta-level guide to how these debates move forward and their significance to society.

What is embryonic stem cell research? Why is it so controversial? What is its relationship to human cloning? Events are moving so fast and biotechnology seems so complicated that many of us don't have an informed opinion about issues that are remaking the human future before our very eyes.

In the new essays collected here, an interdisciplinary group of scholars asks age-old questions about the nature and well-being of humans in the context of a revolutionary new biotechnology - one that has the potential to change the genetic make-up of both existing people and future generations. Welcoming listeners who study related issues and those not yet familiar with the formal study of bioethics, the authors of these essays open up a conversation about the ethics of gene editing.

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

In The Science of Good and Evil, psychologist and science historian Michael Shermer explores how humans evolved from social primates into moral primates, how and why morality motivates the human animal, and how the foundation of moral principles can be built upon empirical evidence. Along the way he explains the implications of scientific findings for fate and free will, the existence of pure good and pure evil, and the development of early moral sentiments among the first humans.

In the face of rapid medical advances in our world, bioethics is a serious concern for many in our society - Christians and non-Christians alike. Here, Gilbert Meilaender, professor of theological ethics at Valparaiso University in Indiana, contends that it is imperative for Christians to think consciously about bioethical issues as Christians if they are not to risk losing their Christian identity.