The Challenge and Opportunity of Genome Editing | Dr. William Hurlbut

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2020

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on November 18, 2020 at Williams College.

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Speaker Bio:

William B. Hurlbut, MD, is Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Scholar in Neurobiology at the Stanford Medical School. After receiving his undergraduate and medical training at Stanford University, he completed postdoctoral studies in theology and medical ethics, studying with Robert Hamerton-Kelly, the Dean of the Chapel at Stanford, and subsequently with the Rev. Louis Bouyer of the Institut Catholique de Paris. His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology with the philosophy of biology. He is the author of numerous publications on science and ethics. He has worked with NASA on projects in astrobiology and was a member of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Working group at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. From 2002-2009 Dr. Hurlbut served on the President’s Council on Bioethics. He serves as a Steering Committee Member of the Templeton Religion Trust.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:04.2	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:10.5	Thank you, Alex.
0:11.8	Great to be here with you guys and try and make this interesting and informative and maybe a little educational.
0:20.2	So I want to start with a slide from a conference that I spoke at at Harvard a few years ago.
0:28.3	And I thought it was an interesting perspective of the whole thing.
0:33.7	Hands, human hands, what Aristotle called the tool of tools,
0:38.9	the symbol of our distinctive body form and unique capacities of mind,
0:44.2	our comprehension, creativity, and control over the world in which we dwell.
0:49.8	And now, like no time before, these hands are a dramatic symbol of our recent progress
1:01.2	in gene editing.
1:02.8	These hands are now turning to operate on our very selves.
1:08.5	So it's clear we're entering an amazing moment in human history.
1:14.8	Seventy years ago, Aldous Huxley anticipating the transformation of human life through
1:20.2	advances in biology as the final and most searching revolution asserted this really
1:26.6	revolutionary revolution is to be achieved not in the
1:31.7	external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings. In the decades since the first
1:38.7	publication of Brave New World amid the accelerating pace of discoveries in genetics, developmental biology, and the
1:45.5	laboratory production of life, there's been increasing appreciation of Huxley's prescient
1:50.7	concerns. Yet throughout this period, limitations are tools and technologies, techniques for
2:00.3	specific and efficient modification of genomes have been a
2:04.4	major constraining factor for advances in biotechnology. Now, however, in what MIT Tech Review has
	...

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