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: 17-06-2024
Who do the ‘techno-optimists’ and gene-editing boosters speak for? As Prof David Christian Rose argued at a recent conference it isn’t necessarily farmers or citizens.
Published: 14-11-2023
At its core, powerful institutions have exploited public confidence and trust that science is produced in a neutral and impartial manner. But when private industry information is not subject to robust debate and challenge, it’s propaganda. Call it what it is and we might be able to start changing things.
Published: 28-10-2023
Genetically engineered organisms in agriculture are, first and foremost, a food system and environmental issue. In recent years the UK government has sought to recontextualise them as a science and innovation issue divorced from their real world uses and consequences. Our 2024 manifesto calls for GMOs to be put back in their rightful context and for this to be the basis for rational policy and regulation of agricultural genetic technologies.
Published: 11-12-2022
The UK’s Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, allows gene editing of wild and free-living species. Shouldn’t we be talking about that?
Published: 31-10-2022
The UK government has committed itself to deregulating genetically engineered organisms created using new ‘gene editing’ technologies. But how well do its proposals align with those elsewhere in the world?
Published: 14-10-2022
A new public dialogue on gene edited farm animals, by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, BBSRC and Sciencewise, challenges the notion that members of the public are incapable of contributing to complex policy and regulatory discussions
Published: 04-10-2022
Calls for sustainability criteria for genome edited organisms are welcome and long overdue, but sustainability cannot be used as a substitute for risk assessment
Published: 26-09-2022
Citizen views are integral to ensuring that technologies and science responds to the needs and wants of society at large. Our new review concludes it’s time to make meaningful citizen engagement part of the DNA of the regulatory process.
