Global Observatory for Gene Editing: Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics for Biotechnology and the Human Future

The Observatory will bring together participants and perspectives from around the world to reflect on the uses of technologies that are poised to alter the meaning of being human. Its purpose is to serve as a corrective to the prematurely narrowed questions, expert perspectives and modes of deliberation that have come to dominate in influential scientific and bioethical arenas. Currently these approaches command significant power to define the scope and terms of debate for evaluating the course of advances in the bioscience, biomedicine and biotechnology. They have tended to privilege technical questions focusing on risk to individuals, constrain ethical framings, and limit the scope of moral deliberation by engaging a restricted set of stakeholders. Moreover, foregrounding the expert imaginations of life scientists to the marginalization of other views of the significance of emerging biotechnologies for the future of humanity has tended to elevate narrowly secular perspectives and sideline alternative moral, religious and spiritual concerns, such as humility in the face of the unknown and indeterminate. The Observatory project aims to meet these challenges through a three-part analytic and deliberative design whose components will inform and enrich each other. First, it will collect and curate in a clearinghouse format the diversity of responses to the range of issues brought into question through GGE. Second, it will create deliberative spaces where representatives of diverse intellectual, cultural, and spiritual traditions can discuss the foundations of their beliefs in a manner designed to foster hospitality and mutual understanding, as well as to generate visions of alternative futures. Third, it will produce a series of high-level outputs that will continue to shape the global public conversation on these technological advances.