Synopsis
In today’s industrialised, globalised world, we live to extreme old age. But this extended life span comes with a trade-off: our DNA is now out of sync with our environment. We can live for eight, nine, even ten decades, while the use-by date on our DNA is closer to 40-50 years. That means people spend their later years living with the diseases of ageing. If our DNA is lettering us down, why shouldn’t we alter it to suit our environment? Precision genetic editing has catapulted us to the threshold of a GATTACA-like world. Now we have to decide whether to take the next step.
Speaker
Prof Julian Savulescu is a recognised world leader in the field of practical ethics. He is trained as a physician and as a philosopher. He has held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford since 2002. In 2003, he founded the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics within the Faculty of Philosophy. In 2014, he was awarded the Wellcome Trust’s flagship Senior Investigator Award on Responsibility and Healthcare. He is also Director of the Institute for Science and Ethics (which is one of the 10 founding Institutes within the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford), and currently Co-Directs the Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease at the School, as well as being Co-I on the Oxford Martin Programme on Resource Stewardship, and Mind and Machine. He has been Principal Investigator for a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant on Cognitive Science and Religious Conflict, and Co-Investigator of an Economic and Social Research Council grant on Geoengineering. Under Savulescu’s leadership, Applied Ethics at Oxford has consistently been ranked in the top group by the Philosophical Gourmet Report. In the most recent report, only Oxford and Harvard are in the top group, with Oxford given the highest ranking in the English-speaking world.
His textbook, Medical Ethics and Law: The Core Curriculum is the standard text in UK medical schools. He is Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics (the top ranked journal in Bioethics according to Google metrics, and in Medical Ethics via Eigenfactor), and founding editor of Journal of Practical Ethics, an open access journal in Practical Ethics launched in 2013. He edits a book series with Oxford University Press, The Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics, whose authors include Frances Kamm, Allen Buchanan, Jonathan Glover and Philip Petit. His book, co-authored with Ingmar Persson, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement was published by OUP in July 2012. He currently has an additional 2 monographs under contact, one with OUP and another with Stanford University Press.