The landing of the first humans on the moon on 20 July 1969 was one of the most moving moments of the 20th century and the television broadcast of the “Apollo 11” mission its first and largest global media event. Up to 600 million people worldwide watched Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the […]

Most readers of novels, and probably also their authors, barely understand the details of technological progress that is developing at breathtaking speed. There is a lot of discussion about new technologies, but few are able imagine how much we will be shaken up by them in the future. In 2006, the American researcher and Stanford […]

Considering the groundbreaking developments in genetic engineering in recent years, it is all too surprising that the new opportunities to bioengineers have not yet provoked a broader public debate. In concrete terms, as humanity we are facing what is probably the most important crossroads of the last 2’000 years: the appropriation of nature by man, […]

Meanwhile, everyone is talking about the genetic scissors “CRISPR”: The news at the end of November 2018 that the Chinese researcher He Jiankui had genetically modified two embryos to protect them from HIV and then implanted those into a woman’s uterus who subsequently gave birth to genetically modified twins (“CRISPR babies”) shocked the world far […]

They take place all over the world, mostly on Fridays, most recently also on the weekend in Switzerland: Climate strikes and climate demonstrations. They have finally brought the debate on how to deal with climate change into the public domain. It says a lot about the state of our society that it took the initiative […]

The political and economic establishment is concerned. What climate researchers, environmental politicians and committed citizens have in the past not been able to achieve is now being accomplished by our children: the danger of global warming is being pushed into the foreground of common attention. Conservative politicians, business associations and right wing intellectuals display their […]

Unlike two years ago, today not many people are still associating the term “CRISPR” with something like a muesli bar. Even though few people know that the term “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” is a technical term that at first described nothing more than certain sections of repeating DNA pieces in the genome of […]

German car drivers have long noticed: the number of insects is decreasing. Compared to 20 years ago, the windshield is hardly smeared with the annoying creatures after racing on the autobahn. What may be pleasant for German car pilots has the potential to develop into a global ecological catastrophe. To some, this may sound alarmist, […]