Saturday 11 November 2023
Roundtable
Exploring the ethics and global governance of genome editing
Thanks to significant technological advances, genome editing is becoming increasingly accessible. The healthcare applications of such innovations offer great potential for personalized medicine and the understanding of many diseases. However, genome-editing techniques also carry safety risks and raise ethical questions. While the potential benefits of genetic therapies on somatic cells could be significant, related scientific practices remain largely unsupervised and access to these therapies is limited. On the other hand, the hereditary modifications enabled by genome editing of embryos are widely decried as unethical. Leading institutions have established governance frameworks to define the parameters for the ethical use of this technology, while working with regulators to apply relevant norms and standards. In a complex international environment, how can we bring this issue to the fore at the political level, so as to define the limits to the use of this biotechnology, while at the same time allowing us to benefit from its potential advantages?
Gabriela Ramos
Assistant Director General for Social and Human Sciences, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
Speaker
Hervé Chneiweiss
Head of Research, CNRS
Moderator
Benjamin Hurlbut
Co-Director, Global Observatory for Genome Editing
Speaker
Katherine Littler
Co-Unit Head, Health Ethics
Speaker
Piers Millett
Executive Director, International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science
Speaker
Shri S Niranjan Reddy
Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, India
Speaker
Intervention on the same theme