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Policy & Advocacy
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Policy & Advocacy
More questions than answers at Gene Editing Summit
Last week, the National Academies of Science and Engineering joined forces with the Chinese Academy of Science and the Royal Society of the United Kingdom to host an International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, DC. Top scholars in genetics, bioengineering, ethics, and law debated the merits of human gene editing; however consensus was far from achieved.…
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Policy & Advocacy
NIGMS names Dorit Zuk as director of GDB division
NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has announced that Dorit Zuk, PhD, will be the next director of the institute’s Division of Genetics and Developmental Biology (GDB). She will join NIGMS in early 2016. NIGMS’ GDB division funds basic research on the cellular and molecular mechanisms related to inheritance, gene expression, and development. Many of…
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Policy & Advocacy
pgEd Briefings: Increasing policymakers’ interest in genetics
Johnny Kung, Director of New Initiatives for the Personal Genetics Education Project (pgEd), fills us in on their latest Congressional briefing. A version of this post is published on the pgEd website and is posted here with permission. On Nov. 17, our group, the Personal Genetics Education Project at Harvard Medical School, held a Congressional…
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Policy & Advocacy
Gene Drive: More research, not more regulations
In October of this year, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine held a public workshop to gather information regarding the safety and ethics of gene drive research. GSA Public Policy Chair Allan Spradling sent the following comments to the committee for consideration. In the late 1980s I was one of the first…
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Policy & Advocacy
Working through the issues: Science, ethics and governance of gene drive research
The Committee on Gene Drive Research in Non-Human Organisms convened by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held an information gathering meeting on October 28, 2015, to consider the Science, Ethics and Governance Considerations for Gene Drive Research. This meeting comes as a component of a large Gene Drive study, which is set to review the…
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Policy & Advocacy
Denise Montell on Capitol Hill
GSA member Denise Montell (University of California, Santa Barbara) spoke on Capitol Hill this summer, presenting her research on anastasis, the process of by which cells can return from the brink of death: Montell, a former President of the North American Drosophila Board, spoke as part of the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus (CBRC) 2015 briefing…
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Policy & Advocacy
Agencies hold first public meeting on the GMO regulatory framework
The Biotechnology Science Coordinating Committee (BSCC), at the behest of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), held the first of three public meetings to discuss an update to the coordinated framework which serves as the regulatory guidelines for genetically engineered organisms. This meeting provided an opportunity for representatives from the primary agencies involved…
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Policy & Advocacy
Nina Fedoroff comments on GMO regulatory reform
The comments below were offered by long-time GSA member Nina Fedoroff at a public meeting on updating the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology held on October 30, 2015. In addition to her academic research career, Dr. Fedoroff served as Science & Technology Adviser to Secretaries of State Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton and U.S.…
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Policy & Advocacy
Budget deal passes the House, offers sequestration relief
On the evening of October 28, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R.1314, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, the budget deal negotiated by the current Congressional leadership and President Obama. The bill passed the House on a vote of 266-167, with 79 Republicans—including all members of the Republican House leadership—joining all 187 voting Democrats…
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Policy & Advocacy
Biotechnology Regulations to be Updated
The federal regulatory policy in use today for biotechnology products, known as the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology, was created in 1986 through a joint effort between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation…
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Policy & Advocacy
Urging Congress to pass spending bills with increases for research
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) has issued an action alert encouraging members of the research community to contact their Members of Congress to support passage of spending bills that support research. GSA is one of 27 FASEB member societies. As reported earlier, the federal government is operating under a continuing resolution that…