Biohacking: Law, food systems, and the future of optimization
Event Information
Panelists:
Henry T. Greely, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, and Director, Stanford University Center for Law and the Biosciences
Laura Schmidt, Professor of Health Policy, UCSF School of Medicine
Nina Begus, Researcher, UC Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society
Moderator:
Janna Z. Huang, Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology
Biohacking — the technological and biomedical optimization of human bodies — offers a critical lens for examining who gets to be “improved,” at what cost, and on whose terms.
The infrastructures that enable or constrain such optimization are never neutral. They shape which bodies are constructed as deficient, which interventions count as legitimate “health,” and whose enhancement is socially, economically, and politically valued.
Bringing together perspectives from the political economy of food systems, the legal frameworks governing emerging biomedical technologies, and bioethics in the humanities and fiction, this panel conversation will illuminate how these interlocking systems shape the techno-political possibilities for bodies. Please join us as our expert panelists explore the intersection of law, food systems, and humanities in biohacking.
Co-sponsored by Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public
About the panelists
Nina Beguš is a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society and BIDS. She leads the Artificial Humanities research group, and funded projects on AI, narration, and culture. Her book, Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI (2025), explores how literature, history, and art can deepen our understanding of artificial intelligence and its development. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume First Encounters with AI: Writers on Writing (2026), featuring essays by professional writers. Her recent papers focus on synthetic imaginary and narratology (Experimental Narratives, 2024) and language in latent spaces (Latent Spacecraft, 2026). She serves on The Public Interest Corpus and MLA Task Forces on AI and collaborates with the tech industry on educational and policy approaches to AI.
Henry T. (Hank) Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law, professor by courtesy of genetics, and director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. He specializes in ethical, legal, and social issues arising from the biosciences, particularly genetics, neuroscience, stem cell research, and assisted reproduction. He is the author of The End of Sex and the Future of Reproduction (Harv. Univ. Press 2016) and CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (MIT Press 2021). Greely graduated from Stanford in 1974 and Yale Law School in 1977. He clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Potter Stewart, then served in the Departments of Defense and Energy in the Carter Administration. He litigated at the Los Angeles firm of Tuttle & Taylor before joining the Stanford faculty in 1985.
Laura A. Schmidt is a public health sociologist who investigates the root causes of chronic disease in commercial products, including ultra-processed foods, alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. Her research has uncovered close ties between the tobacco and ultra-processed food industries, helping us to rethink food from an addiction standpoint. She leads the UCSF Food Policy Lab, which is funded by the US National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Agriculture to innovate new ways to prevent chronic disease by changing food environments.
About the moderator
Janna Huang (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests span economic sociology, organizations, climate politics, and science and technology studies. She employs qualitative and quantitative methods to examine how the organizational, political, and technical dimensions of knowledge production shape different pathways for organizational action, with a specific focus on the regulatory governance and corporate response to climate change.