This course is expected to experience high student demand. Sophomores and new transfers who decide to rank a high-demand WRITE 2 course when making their three selections for priority enrollment are advised to select non-high-demand IntroSems being offered the same quarter for their second and third choices.
Course Description
Should parents be allowed to choose the genetic traits of their children? How should courts use neuroimaging to read the minds of witnesses? How will cheap and common whole genome sequencing change medicine and society? What will happen if we can make eggs and sperm from skin cells, using induced pluripotent stem cell technology? This seminar will examine legal, social, and ethical issues arising from advances in the biosciences. Much of the course will focus on human genetics, but we will also look at advances in assisted reproduction and in neuroscience. Specific topics may (or may not) include forensic use of DNA, genetic testing, genetic discrimination, eugenics, cloning, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, neuroscientific methods of lie detection and genetic or neuroscience enhancement, and other issues that seem interesting this autumn. Students will be required to make two short oral presentations, write a research paper, and deliver an oral presentation of their paper's conclusions. Students will be expected to attend every session as our joint discussion is the class’s most important aspect.
This course fulfills the second-level Writing and Rhetoric Requirement (WRITE 2) and emphasizes oral presentation.
Meet the Instructor: Henry T. (Hank) Greely
"I am a professor of law and a professor, by courtesy, of genetics. I specialize in legal and social implications of advances in the biosciences. I’ve written on genetics, human cloning, stem cell research, and neuroscience, as well as more general issues of the ethics of human subjects research and of human biological enhancement. I direct the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and chairs the steering committee of Stanford's Center for Biomedical Ethics. I received my B.A. in political science at Stanford (‘74) and my J.D. from Yale. I was a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom on the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court. After working during the Carter administration in the Defense and Energy Departments, I was in private law practice as a litigator in Los Angeles for four years. I joined the Law School faculty in 1985."
