Published: 18-02-2025
As the UK pushes ahead with plans to deregulate both environmental and commercial releases of gene-edited crops and foods – and, soon, farm animals – this thoughtful long-read considers whether we are building a bright new future or just a more sophisticated form of man-made pollution.
Published: 06-02-2025
Will the 50th anniversary ‘Spirit of Asilomar’ conference on the future of biotechnology recapture the expansive moral considerations of the pre-1975 Asilomar discussion? Or will it serve as the latest effort bolstering professional immunity from public oversight?
Published: 04-02-2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated nearly every sector of modern life, and the food sector is no exception. Now, new research suggests that consumers remain deeply sceptical about AI’s role in food production, raising serious questions about transparency, safety, and trust.
Published: 18-12-2024
In 2024 we briefly considered – but rejected – a cheeky suggestion to bring back the provocative term ‘Frankenfoods’. The days of that kind of polemic may have passed but, as we note in our year-end reflection, the story of the Modern Prometheus still has something to teach us about foresight and accountability.
Published: 28-11-2024
How important is it for us to trust the food we eat? In this Q&A, food scientist and ethicist Ralph Early argues that trust and honesty are fundamental to the relationship between governments, citizens and food producers and should inform how we interact with the environment and regulate emerging food technologies.
Published: 31-10-2024
Engineered rats, facial recognition for wildlife, ‘disestablishment’ of crucial horizon-scanning and disregard for international treaties. As COP16 wraps up in Cali, Colombia, here’s a trick-or-treat guide to what, sort of, just happened.
Published: 01-10-2024
The Royal Agricultural University’s Cultured Meat & Farmers project was a two-year study that examined the potential impact of cultured meat on UK farmers. Now that it’s wrapping up, what did we learn?
Published: 26-09-2024
A new report from A Bigger Conversation argues that the concept of sustainability has become distorted and compromised, and needs to be radically rethought. It explores how we can shift to a life-centric approach, linked to a core philosophy that sustainability must first and foremost sustain life.
Published: 24-09-2024
If you can’t control or predict the future, how can you prepare for it? In his new book, Prof Ian Scoones suggests that in an increasingly unpredictable world conventional risk management – in finance and banking, critical infrastructures, pandemics, disasters and climate change and technology – is no longer working.
Published: 05-08-2024
In its 2019 report on Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the UK government describes a future characterised by a fusion of technologies and a blurring of the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds. Prof Brigitte Nerlich, offers her thoughts on responsibility in a bio-hybrid world where fact meets fiction.