Category Archives: Blog

Distraction

What a great and stirring piece of news the NASA moonbase announcement was – it had (and still has) the whole world talking about it. Which means that it may be the perfect smokescreen for the incumbent US Administration yanking the funding rug out from under the hugely important climate and earth science research that NASA performs, as well as robotic explorations of other planets.

Neo-Eugenics

Eugenics is a term that comes with a lot of baggage, but in light of our increasing ability to affect our genes, and those of our children, the time is drawing near for the ethics to be re-examined. Is it be morally wrong to abort a foetus diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome, for example? How about the opposite – is it wrong for parents with genetic defects, such as dwarfism or deafness, to use IVF to select the genes that carry those defects so that their child would have the same ones?