Did you hear about the secret meeting earlier this month at Harvard Medical School? The one where scientists schemed to create a parentless human being from scratch? Maybe you read one of the skeptical news articles, or the stories illustrated with images from the dystopian sci-fi classic “Blade Runner” or of a robot Frankenstein. One blogger compared the meeting to a gathering of “Bond villains.”
The press coverage was suspicious and critical. Why would a bunch of scientists need to exclude the media and the public from a meeting about something as ethically fraught as synthesizing a human genome?
Three weeks later, the exact details of what happened are still being contested. I’m a researcher in synthetic biology, and I learned of the project from reading the newspaper. I reached out to the meeting’s organizers, who – for reasons I’ll explain – declined to comment for this article. But in conversations with meeting invitees, as well as some critics, I’ve found that much of the press coverage was misleading, and says more about the relationship between journalists and scientists than the meeting itself.
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http://www.livescience.com/54871-did-harvard-scientists-secretly-discuss-artificial-human.html#sthash.isA3jWTZ.dpuf