News & Comment

Participatory knowledge creation on platforms such as Wikipedia has revealed the enormous democratizing potential of the Internet. It has also exposed its limitations.

Despite opprobrium from the scientific community, the creation of the first CRISPR babies by germline genome editing has led to a debate more about execution than intent. We need public education, engagement and empowerment to reach ‘broad societal consensus’ on whether, not how, to pursue heritable genome editing, argues Françoise Baylis.

Human enhancement technologies are opening tremendous opportunities but also challenges to the core of what it means to be human. We argue that the goal of human enhancement should be to enhance quality of life and well-being not only of individuals but also of the communities they inhabit.

Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.

Gender inequalities in work–family balance have wide-reaching ramifications: women shoulder the greatest burden of unpaid work and care, both decreasing their opportunities for employment and contributing significantly to the gender pay gap. Concerted measures at both the policy and ideological level are required to redress this problem.

Understanding how humans behave, why we behave the way we do, what the consequences of our behaviour are and how behaviour can change are complex, multi-faceted questions, addressed by numerous diverse disciplines that rely on different methods and types of data. We welcome them all in the journal.