Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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Center for Ethics

Radiologists wrestle with robots – ethically

Radiologists look at and analyze images, tasks computer algorithms can do. This is fertile soil for artificial intelligence (AI) — enough so that some predict that AI will replace radiologists.

John Banja, PhD

Emory bioethicist John Banja says: don’t believe the hype. AI will generate tools radiologists will want to use, he says. But human experts will have plenty to do, including making sure that the algorithms are properly vetted and trained on appropriate data.

“We already know what a lot of the ethical issues are going to be…informed consent, privacy, data protection, ownership, all that kind of stuff,” Banja recently told Health Imaging. “What we need to do is drill down to the next level, especially the practice level.”

Banja has received a grant from the Advanced Radiology Services Foundation to support a series of podcasts with radiologists over the next two years. He will be teaming up with Emory radiologist Rich Duszak, a specialist in health policy, and Norm Beauchamp, medical dean at Michigan State.

Banja and Duszak are still planning podcast sessions and lining up interviews, but they said the first episode will be on “AI hype”, and the second will cover standard of care/medical malpractice, with future issues on FDA standards.

Duszak comments on how radiologists need to take control of the algorithms in this video.

Also, with radiology chair Carolyn Meltzer, Banja recently published a review on ethics related to radiology and AI, exploring issues such as selection bias and stretching algorithms too far. Read more

Posted on November 26, 2019 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

A few links for BEINGS2015

Several well-known authors, scientists and bioethicists are in downtown Atlanta’s Tabernacle for the #BEINGS2015 conference. Paul Wolpe and the Center for Ethics have been central to organizing the event, and several Emory biomedical and genetics researchers will be involved in shaping the consensus documents that will emerge.

I won’t attempt to summarize the ongoing discussion at this point; with biotechnology, it is difficult to draw a circle around certain topics and say “we’re going to focus on this, but not this” and today was a good example. The border between existing agricultural biotechnology and new organisms seems hard to define.

Three interesting relevant links:

The National Academy of Sciences is launching an effort to guide decision making on human gene editing technologies such as Cas9/CRISPR

Collection of scientists’ comments on human gene editing and Cas9/CRISPR in Nature Biotechnology

Nature Chem Bio paper on engineered yeast that “paves way for home brew heroin”. Interesting role of FBI in overseeing this emerging area, and note that full production of opiates in yeast may look close, but is still not yet possible.

 

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment