Dear Colleagues,

This is the last issue before an  IHP summer break till early September. On the 23^rd of August, though, colleagues of mine will make a short newsletter, so stay tuned for that!

I’ll leave you for now with a short (& bleak) reflection 😊.

Against a rather worrying planetary and geopolitical backdrop (warning: understatement), it gets clearer and clearer by the day that mankind seems hellbent on “playing for God” in the 21^st century. True, the nuclear era already started before halfway the 20^th century, but in various scientific areas (AI, killer robots, gene drives,  chimeras  (human-animal hybrid embryos), mindreading by Facebook (huh), geoengineering, …  and as this is not exactly my forte, I’m sure many more exciting “innovations” in plenty of areas are being explored as we speak), all bets really seem off now.

Why? Out of curiosity ( the scientific equivalent of ‘to boldly go where no man/woman has gone before’ ); “because we can”, now; to boost scientific...