The Future of Human Reproduction
An innovative, interdisciplinary research programme, funded by Wellcome, exploring the cultural, ethical, legal and social challenges that will emerge as technological advances fundamentally change the possibilities for human reproduction.
Our Vision
To push academic boundaries by developing new methods, research agendas and interdisciplinary ways of working to tackle the conceptual and ethical implications of a range of future reproductive scenarios likely to be technologically possible within a generation.
Major Research Themes
The complete or partial gestation of a fetus outside of the human body, in an artificial womb environment, creating children who have not been ‘born’ in the usual sense of the term.
The creation of embryos from artificial eggs and sperm opening up the possibility of same-sex, multiplex (multi-person) or singular genetic parenting.
A type of genetic engineering that enables changes to the DNA of organisms. This could lead to future children being ‘chosen’ or ‘designed’ with far greater levels of prevision than at present.
Our Team
We are a team of academics and researchers from six different humanities and social sciences disciplines: design, English literature, law, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.
Featured Posts
Author Simon Mawer talks about the inspiration for his novel Mendel’s Dwarf, his fascination with the language of science and what advances in genetics could mean for the future.
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Academics and researchers from The Future of Human Reproduction team have contributed to a Government policy briefing on human stem cell based embryo models (SCBEMs)
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Stephen Wilkinson, Distinguished Professor of Bioethics at Lancaster University and Principal Investigator on The Future of Human Reproduction programme, has been appointed to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
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To mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science, our blog focuses on the groundbreaking work of Profs Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool.
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