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."...

Genomics

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

AI and Human Gene Editing

By Pete Shanks | 11.13.2023

^{Coded Bias is on Netflix; the trailer is

also at The Algorithmic Justice League}

A few weeks ago, Marc Andreessen...

Genetic Selection

AI, Biotech, and the Race to Control the Future

By Pete Shanks | 10.12.2023

Artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic biology, and gene editing are powerful technologies that are being developed with remarkable speed and are...

Policies

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