India needs home-grown GM food to stop starvation

Indian scientists must develop domestic genetically modified crops rather than rely on unsuitable foreign technology, says Anurag Chaurasia,a biotechnologist with the National Bureau of Agriculturally Important Microorganisms in Kushmaur, India.

 At the beginning of this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a road map to guide India’s science and technology over the next two decades. Launched during the Indian Science Congress at the University of Mysore, the plan signalled a cautious approach to techniques such as genetically modified (GM) crops, noting that “some aspects of biotechnology have posed serious legal and ethical problems in recent years”. That is true, but a different and much larger problem looms for India. According to the 2015 United Nations World Population Prospects report, India will surpass China by early next decade as the most populous country on Earth, with the most mouths to feed. India is already classed as having a ‘serious’ hunger problem, according to the 2015 Global Hunger Index of the International Food Policy Research Institute. There is a danger that many of these new Indians will not have sufficient food.

Where can additional food come from? Grain production is stagnant, and rapid urbanization is reducing available land. To increase food production, India needs to invest in modern agricultural methods, including GM crops.

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Gene editing can now be performed in the UK – what you need to know

It’s no longer science fiction. Modern science has the ability to manipulate the DNA of a human embryo. In a world’s first, scientists in China announced last year that they had edited a mutated gene which causes a blood disorder in a human embryo.

Now UK scientists have won permission to genetically modify human embryos too.

But how exactly does it work? And what happens if edited genes are inherited by future generations? Could we be looking at a future of “designer babies”, or indeed a future of “designer humans”? All you need to know in our roundup.

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A History of Business Ethics

The history of “business ethics” depends on how one defines it. Although the term is used in several senses and varies somewhat for different countries, its current use originated in the United States and became widespread in the 1970s. The history of business ethics in the United States can be viewed as the intersection of three intertwined strands. Each of these in turn can be divided into at least two related branches.

The first strand, which I shall call the ethics-in-business strand, is the long tradition of applying ethical norms to business, just as it has been applied to other areas of social and personal life. This strand can be divided further into the secular and the religious branches. 

The second strand is the development of an academic field, which has been called business ethics.
It also has two main branches, one being the philosophical business-ethics branch, which is normative and critical, and the other the social-scientific branch, which is primarily descriptive and empirical.

The third strand is the adoption of ethics or at least the trappings of ethics in businesses. This again subdivides into the integration of ethics into business and business practices on the one hand and the commitment to corporate social responsibility on the other.

Business ethics was introduced into Europe and Japan in the 1980s although the term did not translate easily, and the development in each country varied from that in the United States because of socio-political-economic differences. It then spread in a variety of ways to other parts of the world, each time with a different local emphasis and history. On the world-wide level it became associated with the UN Global Compact, initiated by the then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in an address to The World Economic Forum on January 31, 1999, and officially launched in July, 2000.

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10+ things you can do to avoid ethical breaches

Enron… Worldcom… Something-gate… Hardly a day goes by without news of someone or some company in trouble because of ethical issues. For the good of the organization, and for the good of your own career, it’s important to avoid ethical issues — and conversely, to act ethically.

Here are some things to consider in this regard. The first two items are directed at the leadership of an organization, while the rest pertain to everyone.

1. Have a code of conduct
2. Model the behavior you wish to see
3. Disclose any conflicts of interest
4. Recuse yourself
5. Get consent
6. Find an alternate method
7. Avoid the issue or question
8. Focus on the issue, not the person
9. Stress the advantages of the ethical approach
10. Document key matters
11. Blow the whistle

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