What do current developments in the emerging field of synthetic biology means for ethics and public policy? Thomas H. Murray, President of The Hastings Center, delivers the Third Annual AAAS-Hitachi Lecture on Science & Society.
Bio
Thomas H. Murray
Thomas H. Murray is President of The Hastings Center. Dr. Murray was formerly the Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was also the Susan E. Watson Professor of Bioethics. He is a founding editor of the journal Medical Humanities Review, and is on the editorial boards of The Hastings Center Report; Human Gene Therapy; Politics and the Life Sciences; Cloning, Science, and Policy; Medscape General Medicine; Teaching Ethics; Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. He served as President of the Society for Health and Human Values and of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
Study of living things and their vital processes. An extremely broad subject, biology is divided into branches. The current approach is based on the levels of biological organization involved (e.g., molecules, cells, individuals, populations) and on the specific topic under investigation (e.g., structure and function, growth and development). According to this scheme, biology's main subdivisions include morphology, physiology, taxonomy, embryology, genetics, and ecology, each of which can be further subdivided. Alternatively, biology can be divided into fields especially concerned with one type of living thing; for example, botany (plants), zoology (animals), ornithology (birds), entomology (insects), mycology (fungi), microbiology (microorganisms), and bacteriology (bacteria). See alsobiochemistry; molecular biology.