I have recently completed my book mss. A Brave New Eugenics: CRISPR and the Human Future which can be downloaded here. While it gives a popular (I hope accessible) account of CRISPR and its history, as well as provides a reflection on eugenics, it does defend human germ-line intervention for a host of diseases caused …
Monarch Declines: A Blog Post
The Travis Audubon Society just published my post on Monarch Butterfly declines. I will have more to say on our attempts to monitor the journey south on this blog in the near future.
Correction and Addendum to Measles Resurgence in the USA: How International Travel Compounds Vaccine Resistance
In the paper that appeared last week, we wish to correct the list of countries travel from which presents the greatest risk to the U.S. in 2019. The following correction will appear in The Lancet Infectious Diseases: The list of countries that pose the highest risk of measles to the USA was been corrected to …
Measles and Austin: A Commentary
A commentary based on my earlier post has appeared in the Austin American Statesman.
Media Response to Travel and Measles Risk
Note: The media office at Johns Hopkins has collected the media sites covering our work--see the Excel File they have produced. I will stop updating this page. Almost all the sources below are found in their list but with some very notable exception, for instance, the New York Times! Our paper on travel-induced risk for …
Continue reading "Media Response to Travel and Measles Risk"
Measles Resurgence in the USA: How International Travel Compounds Vaccine Resistance
Lauren Gardner (now at Johns Hopkins University) and I, along with Aleksa Zlojutro (UNSW Sydney) and Kamran Khan (University of Toronto) have just published this paper in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. It is a spatial risk analysis for measles in the United States. Our point of departure was the spatial analysis of the antivaccine movement in …
Preventing Measles in Austin
Measles has returned to the United States with a vengeance even though it was officially eliminated in 2000. Since that date, until 2014, occasional outbreaks had occurred because of importation of the virus from remaining measles-prone areas of the world. In 2014, there were 667 cases. This year, by the end of April, the case …
Peter Hotez’s Vaccination Book
Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor School of Medicine in Houston (among many other positions), is well-known for bringing Neglected Tropical Diseases to the center of medical attention over the last fifteen years. As Founding Editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (in which I have published multiple times) …
Gene Elimination and Genetic Enhancement: Yet Another Reason Why the Moral Dilemmas are Different
In discussions of potential eugenics that have become inevitable in the CRISPR era a distinction keeps on being made between gene elimination and genetic enhancement. Typically, it seems to be implicitly assumed that these are the only options when it comes to human germline editing though, as we see in the recent moratorium proposal in …
The Proposed Moratorium on Clinical Human Germline Editing
As most readers of this blog will know, last week Eric Lander and seventeen others (all seem to be biologists) published a commentary in Nature arguing for an immediate moratorium on clinical human germline editing. (For short, I will call this the Lander proposal while fully acknowledging the other authors.) The Presidents of the U.S. National …
Continue reading "The Proposed Moratorium on Clinical Human Germline Editing"
Sahotra Sarkar 