Hank Greely Seminar: Playing with Life – From HeLa to Unicorns to Manta Raybots

The living world is considerably more varied and bizarre than most people realize. It is becoming even stranger as we humans learn how to manipulate existing life to our ends as well as to extend life’s boundaries. Hybrids, symbiotes, chimeras, cyborgs, genetically modified organisms, newly designed living things, newly designed “sort of” living things – all are under becoming more plausible and more common in light of today’s research. This talk is a brief exploration of what I hope will be my next book. I want it to provide some examples of the varieties and sope of coming human interventions into the biosphere (as well as context about our past actions) and then to consider two big questions – what should we do about these changes and how should we think about them?

Playing with Life:
From HeLa to Unicorns to Manta Raybots

Dr. Hank Greely

Professor of Law and Genetics

Stanford University