A PROMISE THAT IS AT ONCE A CHALLENGE Gene editing offers great promise to reduce human misery and facilitate human health: to combat virus infectious diseases; to correct monogenic disorders in pluripotent...
Given the primacy accorded to the protection of civilians by the United Nations (UN) Security Council and individual UN agencies and bodies, one would expect there to be a system-wide UN policy on the...
Servant of the People By Rebecca Kingston, Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and author of Plutarch’s Prism: Classical Reception and Public Humanism in France and England 1500-1800...
How do we know that global temperatures are rising? Why is Pluto no longer considered to be a full-sized planet? Are modal verbs such as must, shall and may are on the decline in the English language?...
One gloomy afternoon in November 1991 I was handed a photocopy of a news pamphlet, a printed Elizabethan booklet containing the story of a witch trial held in 1582. I’d had no idea there was anything...
Often ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ are spoken of together, as if they are almost the same. But they aren’t. If you’re a ‘refugee’, it has been accepted that you can’t go back to...
In the spring of 1716, the entire French financial community was put on trial in a ritual prosecution known as the chambre de justice. Over the preceding centuries, these trials were held periodically,...
Is vaccine hesitancy purely irrational? Are there good reasons for refusing to wear a face mask? These are some of the questions we address in our forthcoming book Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics:...
Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, desertification, and increasing pollution and toxicity of the air, water, and land: Uncontainable by national borders, these are quintessentially global...
Traditionally, the majority of human rights pertain to physical actions and visible objects in the outside world. To a far lesser degree, they protect our internal lives, such as emotions, intentions,...
Introduction Most of us take for granted the freedom to live our lives in the ways that we choose, with restrictions on our freedom only limited by the extent to which they harm others. While we may...
“Never Again,” the campaign to end extreme hunger emerged out of the 2011 famine in Somalia, yet today, in Somalia, seven and a half million people are facing food shortages while over 200,000 people...