Polarizing Biotechnologies and a Polarized Public
New Challenges for Global Calls for Public Engagement in Human Genome Editing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55613/jeet.v35i2.168Keywords:
Genome editing, public engagement, socio-political polarization, genobility, liberal democracyAbstract
The rapid advancements in genome editing, particularly with CRISPR-Cas9, have brought long-promised medical breakthroughs to reality, but also has also accelerated ethically fraught applications. To develop adequate ethical safeguards and effective governance, many endorse public engagement as an essential aspect of this response. This paper tests this confidence by applying it to an emerging existential risk that this rapid development of genome editing, when combined with similarly rapidly growing socio-political polarisation, poses to liberal democracy. While this argument has some echoes of Maxwell Mehlman’s spectre of a genetically enhanced "genobility" destroying the basis of liberal democracy, I outline how this new concern is more plausible, more immediate and, moreover, possibly far more intractable a problem than Mehlman was considering. This is exacerbated by considering how the perception of genome editing’s potential—rather than its actual capabilities—may be affected by and, in turn, may worsen this rising socio-political polarisation. Given the confidence in the positive role of public engagement with respect to the technology that is involved here, I evaluate its effectiveness, arguing that certain forms of engagement may inadvertently worsen things, whereas stronger deliberative approaches hold promise but face significant, potentially insurmountable, barriers, at least for now.
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