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Politics

Ben Hurlbut – On Genome Editing and the Politics of the Human Future

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Inevitable Progress: GenomeEditing, Sovereign Science &? the Politics of the Human Future

J. Benjamin Hurlbut, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University

קולוקוויום בר אילן למדע, טכנולוגיה וחברה

יום א׳, 17ינואר, 18:00

Following the advent ofCRISPR/Cas9, leading scientists expressed worries that this powerful andaccessible genome editing tool might be applied to human embryos, creatingheritable genetic changes in the human germline. Even as the)’ called forstrict limits, many also asserted that heritable human genome editing wasinevitable. Several years later this prophesy was fulfilled when the worldlearned that a young Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, had produced babies whosegenomes had been edited. This talk will explore how an imaginary ofinevitability shapes approaches to ethical deliberation and governance ofemerging biotechnology, focusing on the case of human genome editing. Drawingon interviews with He Jiankui and his colleagues, this talk will examine hismotivations, the advice and support he received from senior figures in thesciences and government, and the reactions from the international scientificcommunity that followed. I show how He’s project was situated within, ratherthan an aberration from, an approach to ethics and governance that is regulatedby the presumption of technological inevitability. I argue that the imaginaryof inevitability is an imaginary of right governance: it asserts relationsbetween science, technolog)׳ and society that construct ethical deliberation asnecessarily reactive, science as at once intrinsically progressive andsovereign, and governance as driven by and subsidiary to technologicalinnovation. Predicting the inevitable illicitly authorizes science to definethe parameters of deliberation even as it empowers scientists to declare whatthe future shall be.

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