GCR News Summary April 2014

Post Date May 09, 2014
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Soap and chlorine image courtesy of UNICEF Guinea under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Tensions continued to run high between Russia and the acting government of Ukraine as well-armed pro-Russian groups occupied strategic buildings across eastern Ukraine and skirmished with the Ukrainian military. An agreement between Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the EU to lower tensions fell apart when separatists captured military observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and …

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The Ethics of Global Catastrophic Risk from Dual-Use Bioengineering

Post Date January 04, 2014
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Category ethics, publications

View the paper “The Ethics of Global Catastrophic Risk from Dual-Use Bioengineering”

Dual-use technologies are technologies that can be used in both beneficial and harmful ways. Some technologies produced through biological engineering (bioengineering) are dual-use. Of all the possible harms from dual-use technologies, global catastrophic risk is a significant concern. Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are risks of events that could significantly harm or even destroy civilization at the global scale. This paper discusses ethical issues raised by those bioengineered technologies that pose a GCR. The paper …

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GCR News Summary June 2013

Post Date July 01, 2013
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U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius speaking to the World Health Assembly image courtesy of US Mission Geneva/Eric Bridiers.

“Every pandemic emergence seems to be a law unto itself.” David Morens, Jeffrey Taubenberger, and Anthony Fauci wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that there’s no evidence viruses that develop one mutation that could lead them to becoming pandemic will necessarily develop any others. In fact, an important open question is whether any bird flu virus that infects humans could viably develop the …

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New Paper: Ethics & Dual-Use Bioengineering

Post Date June 28, 2013
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Category emerging technologies, ethics, law & policy, publications

GCRI has a new academic paper out. The ethics of global catastrophic risk from dual-use bioengineering, by Seth Baum and Grant Wilson, has been accepted for publication in Ethics in Biology, Engineering and Medicine. The paper was written for a talk of the same title presented at the 7th Annual International Conference on Ethical Issues In Biomedical Engineering.

The paper discusses ethics and law issues raised by dual-use bioengineering. Dual-use technologies are technologies with both beneficial and harmful applications. Bioengineered technologies can be both very beneficial …

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GCR News Summary May 2013

Post Date May 31, 2013
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Sunset from Mauna Loa Observatory image courtesy of NOAA/Eric Johnson.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported that for the first time the daily mean atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory was higher than 400 parts per million. The concentration of CO2 has grown at an increasing rate since the observatory began taking measurements in 1958. The concentration of CO2 is generally believed to be 40% higher than it was before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It …

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GCR News Summary April 2013

Post Date April 29, 2013
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You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).

So far 115 people have been diagnosed with a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 that was previously unknown in humans. Twenty-three of the people known to have contracted the disease have already died. The discovery of a 4-year-old boy who has the virus but who has no apparent …

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GCRI’s First Publication, On Emerging Technologies And International Law, By Grant Wilson

Post Date November 27, 2012
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Category emerging technologies, law & policy, publications

As part of its research, GCRI is working on several research papers for peer-reviewed publication. The first of these papers has now been accepted, and so we are adding a publications page to our website. We will be adding more publications to this page as they become available.

The first paper, by Grant Wilson, is titled “Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law“. The paper has been accepted at Virginia Environmental Law Journal and can be downloaded from the Social Science …

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