 Once
the genie is out of the bottle,
there's no putting it back
Immunologist and Nobel Laureate Peter
Doherty discussed the impacts and potentials of developments
in biotechnology and considered the development of social and political
maturity to exercise its deployment wisely.
Doherty said that we can now analyse the spectrum of genetic material
and that knowledge of the genome brings great promise as well as
great problems. Obviously, there are ethical debates and questions
which need to be addressed and stressed the importance of good,
ethical and social debate on each and every one of these issues.
Doherty explained that the human genome project had an ethical component
built into it whereby people with strong public interest have been
involved in looking at the implication of this research and asking
what kind of legislation or appropriate controls so this research
is not misused. Biological scientists operate under strict guidelines
and require ethics committee approval for animal and human experimentation.
In this respect there is a great deal of input into this research
and society exercises reasonable control over medical research.
Such restrictions in the medical area are not the same in other
research areas such as technological development.
GMF, drugs and our daily lives
In his lecture, Peter Doherty discusses the wide ranging developments
in genetic research from genetically modified food to the production
of new drugs and considers how these will impact on our lives.
File: doherty.mp3 Duration: 27:48 Size: 2.2MB
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