Jonathan Anomaly is a co-founder of Herasight, a company that develops advanced genetic tests for families who have children through in vitro fertilization. Prior to this, Professor Anomaly taught at Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, and UPenn. This talk is a book launch for Creating Future People: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement (Routledge, 2024).
Anomaly will begin with an overview of the transformative reproductive technologies that will soon be available to people around the globe. He’ll then consider the policy challenges these technologies raise, including concerns some will have over the pursuit of positional goods, the emergence of large genetic inequalities, and the potential for governmental abuse. Anomaly will end by considering the potential benefits of various kinds of government regulations. He ultimately defends the principle of regulatory parsimony, which holds that when regulations are needed to solve a serious collective action problems for which social norms are insufficient, those regulations should be few in number, easy to interpret, and sensitive to what other countries are doing. Otherwise, Anomaly argues, black markets in reproductive technologies will exacerbate the kinds of problems they are intended to solve.
Join us on Zoom here. Location: Rowling Hall 3.414, 300 W Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Austin, TX 78705