An evening of Brainwaves – from how science is done to designer babies.
Dr Richard Wingate – Head of Anatomy, King’s College London.
‘Ambiguity, imagination and artefact: how science is really done’: How do you understand something that has never been seen before by human eyes? Scientific discovery constantly runs up against ambiguity and its successes are a result of imagination not deduction.
Dr Tom Butts – Lecturer in Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Liverpool.
‘Should we legalise ‘designer babies’?’: The ability to genetically modify animals has led to decades of scientific advances into how embryos develop, and also how development goes awry in all sorts of diseases from cancer to autism. However, an exciting new tool developed in the last decade, genome editing, allows genetic modification to be done so easily that it had been imagined to be applicable to humans. It is not science fiction anymore: in late 2018, the first genetically modified human babies (twin girls) were born in China. This talk will explore how this was done, and whether it should be allowed.
Free but do buy a drink.