Pete Shanks

Pete Shanks, MA, attended Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and moved to California in the mid-1970s. He has been active in a range of local and international political movements, while mostly making his living in the publishing industry, especially on the production side; he enjoys the craft of bookmaking. Appalled by the eugenic possibilities of biotechnology, he has consulted with the Center for Genetics and Society since its earliest days. He is the author of Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed (Nation Books) and a regular contributor to Biopolitical Times.

Publications

Of baseball and enhancement bondage

By Pete Shanks, San Francisco Chronicle | 09.26.2005

Baseball fans around the nation have been conducting their own straw poll about human enhancement, and they don't like it...

Human Genetic Modification

Happy birthday, Louise

By Pete Shanks, San Jose Mercury News | 07.24.2003

The birth of Louise Brown in Oldham, England, on July 25, 1978, was front-page news all over the world. Time...

Human Genetic Modification

Science and Society: Time to act on biotech's human repercussions

By Pete Shanks, San Francisco Chronicle | 07.23.2003

Twenty-five years ago, the use of in vitro fertilization to conceive the first "test-tube" baby provoked an important debate --...

Human Genetic Modification

In the News

Should We Be Trying to Bring Extinct Species Back to Life?

By Pete Shanks, Alternet | 04.08.2013

There's a buzz now around bringing species back from the dead. There's even a spiffy new name for it: "de-extinction."...

Should You Be Able to Clone Your Pet?

By Pete Shanks, Junior Scholastic | 02.27.2012

Thanks to advances in technology, scientists can extract cells from an animal and implant them into a surrogate mother. If...

Animal Biotechnologies

Cloning for Kicks

By Pete Shanks, GeneWatch (Sep-Oct 2009) | 10.22.2009

Pet cloning is a terrible idea - and, we now know, an extremely unpopular one. Cloning endangered species is equally...

Biotech & Pharma

Biopolitical Times

Natalism and Hipster Eugenics

By Pete Shanks | 09.21.2023

^{Front page of the Natal Conference website}

Last November, this blog published a piece with the title “Hipster Eugenics...

Global Governance

Ineffective Altruism, Apocalypse, and Human Genetic Enhancement

By Pete Shanks | 07.21.2023

^{"File:View of Nauru airport.jpg" by Cedric Favero

is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.}

The first part of...

Lessons From A Cloning Scandal

By Pete Shanks | 07.07.2023

^{Poster for King of Clones (Netflix documentary) via Wikipedia}

Back in the early years of this century, the most prominent...

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