Selecting Humans: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Gökçe Senger shares her ethics & society case study, which she completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. The term eugenics is derived from the Greek term Eugene, meaning ‘well-born.’ In 1883, it was first used by Sir Francis Galton, a British scholar and cousin of Charles Darwin1. He realized that high-quality intelligence and abilities were inherited through generations with an efficiency of 20%1. He then theorized that the human population could be improved by selecting individuals with desirable traits and encouraging […]

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Synthetic Biology Ethics

Palmer Fliss shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. When one hears the phrase “synthetic biology”, images of clone soldiers, designer babies, cyborgs, and GMOs spring to mind. With the cost of genetic sequencing dropping precipitously thanks to advances in the technology, coupled with the rise of increasingly specific genetic manipulation techniques, synthetic biology has developed from a field only touched upon in science fiction to a real scientific field […]

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Podcast: Genomes, the Fossil Record and More

Our “BlueSciCon” podcast for September features a conversation with Dr. Betul Kacar titled “Genomes, the fossil record and more: Accessing the artifacts of Earth’s earliest evolutionary history“. Living organisms today can help us understand the fossil record, as the genetic sequences of life today provides a direct link to the past. Experimental evolutionary biologists like Dr. Kacar are able to study microorganisms through hundreds and thousands of generations to understand how evolutionary selection pressures are directly expressed in these populations. […]

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BlueSciCon Episode 41: Genomes, the fossil record and more: Accessing the artifacts of Earth’s earliest evolutionary history

Dr. Betul Kacar Listen: [mp3 download] Questions to consider: What is experimental evolution? How do living microorganisms help us to better understand the fossil record? What is involved in “reconstructing” a genome? How do we understand the connection between protein functions and organism behavior? [ca_audio url=”http://beerwith.bmsis.org/BlueSciCon_41_SEP2015.mp3″ width=”500″ height=”27″ css_class=”codeart-google-mp3-player”]

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Betul Kacar’s Work Featured by Quanta

Paleogenomics involves the study of ancient genomic histories to understand the mechanisms of evolution. Dr. Betul Kacar’s experimental evolution research involves the application of ancient protients into modern E. coli to track how the microbes adapt to these changes. Dr. Kacar’s work was recently featured in Quanta magazine and represents a critical step in understanding the processes by which life evolves. [read the article at Quanta magazine]

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