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.

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In the News

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...

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...

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 --...

Biopolitical Times

At the opening of this year’s Annual Meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research on June 14, Magdalena...

Adapted from Mitochondrial DNA at
National Human Genome Research Institute

The Guardian reports that “a small number of babies” with...

On April 19–21, the National Academies are hosting an extended Workshop on:

In Vitro Derived Human Gametes as a Reproductive...