Program
- 4:00PM
Welcome and Introduction
Summit introduction: overview and key aims
- 5:00PM
Opening Panel: Twists and Turns in Decoding Life
Ten years into the CRISPR era and 50 years since Asilomar, how has our understanding of life and the potential for intervening in its molecular and social meanings evolved? What progress has been made–in biology, law, policy, politics, religion, and ethics—to govern our growing technical ability to control the building blocks of heredity and life? What further work most urgently needs to be done?
- 6:30PM
Reception
- 9:00AM
Framing Visions
Summit mission and objectives.
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- 9:30AM
Panel 1: Health in the CRISPR Era
Speakers: Vijay Chandru (National Centre for Biological Sciences, India), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University), Fyodor Urnov (University of California, Berkeley), Jonathan Kahn (Northeastern University), Judy Norsigian (Our Bodies Ourselves)
Moderator: Benjamin Hurlbut (Arizona State University)
How is the capacity to genetically edit bodies or make heritable changes changing our conceptions of health and disease? Do these changes create new tensions between individual and population health? Between therapy and enhancement? Do they adequately grapple with genetic diversity and global economic inequality?
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- 10:45AM
Coffee Break
- 11:00AM
Panel 2: Limits of Engineering
The CRISPR era has brought new abilities—and ambitions—to engineer life. Biotechnologies enable the construction of human embryo-like entities, human-animal chimeras, and other artificial entities that resemble features of biological humanness. As technical barriers are broken, what ethical limits are needed, and how do we find them? What do these powerful techniques mean for academic freedom and responsibility, commercial applications, justice and social progress?
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- 12:15PM
Keynote Address - Marcia McNutt (President, National Academy of Sciences)
- 1:45PM
Panel 3: Biocapital and the Conditions of Innovation
Are intellectual property and capital steering genome editing and related biotechnology innovations toward serving the public good? What opportunities or challenges do concentrations of capital or proprietary control pose for innovation and the distribution of its risks and benefits? Should there be limits to commodification—of techniques, of products, of human and non-human life—and who should set them?
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- 3:00PM
Coffee Break
- 3:30PM
Keynote Panel: Cosmopolitan Bioethics
Modern biotechnologies are poised to alter what it means to be human. In deliberating on how to govern these technologies, how can we foster a “cosmopolitan ethics”: one that affirms diversity, aspires to mutual understanding, is committed to deep, sustained, inclusive engagement with matters of collective moral concern, and favors a posture of humility? What are the impediments and frictions?
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- 4:45PM
Panel 4: Public Imaginations of Public Goods
Governance of genome editing has become more inclusive in some respects, but significant asymmetries remain: between North and South, between researchers and patients, and between scientific agendas and societies’ needs. What conceptions dominate and which ideas tend to be excluded? What reforms are needed to make space for alternative visions of technological innovation and the public good?
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- 9:00AM
Recap: Looking Back, Ahead
- 9:30AM
Panel 5: Sources of Moral Authority: Science, Religion, Law, Medicine
Genome editing and related biotechnologies run up against questions of human integrity, meaning and purpose that science alone cannot address. How should science and technology productively converse with other sources of moral authority, including religion, law, ethics, and medical practice? What are the greatest frictions or barriers?
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- 10:45AM
Coffee Break
- 11:00AM
Panel 6: Modalities of Governance, from the Asilomar Conference to CRISPR Summits
Many mechanisms and institutions have sought to guide the responsible development of genome editing: ethics committees, scientific journals, public consultation, citizens juries, and international summits. How should we assess the successes and failures of these models, especially with respect to making norms that are likely to affect all of humanity? What structures, practices, and assumptions constrain participation and/or inhibit improvements in governance?
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- 12:15PM
Lunch
- 12:35PM
Center for Genetics and Society Special Session: Bringing Excluded Voices to the Table
Speakers: Sarojini Nadimpally (SAMA - Resource Group for Women and Health), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University), Katie Hasson (Center for Genetics and Society), Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet University)
Moderator: Françoise Baylis (Dalhousie University)
Bringing civil society into conversations on human genome editing and related practices is a key but often neglected aspect of public engagement. Why is this important? What does it look like and how does it work? This panel brings together advocates and scholars working closely with civil society and social change organizations across women’s health, reproductive rights and justice, and disability rights to discuss what it takes to truly include missing and excluded voices. Panelists will share examples of collaborations among academia and social change organizations and highlight ways that engaging civil society has changed the conversation – for example by opening space for consideration of under-recognized eugenic and other social consequences of these technologies for the future of justice and equality.
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- 1:45PM
Panel 7: Globalization and Its Frictions
If the human genome is “the common heritage of humankind,” then governance must be a global responsibility. How should global governance institutions assert authority over life sciences and technologies that reach into matters as intimate and personal as health and reproduction? What are the primary responsibilities and limits of global governance institutions?
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- 3:00PM
Panel 8: Alternative Futures: Reorientation and Renewal
Biotechnology promises to reduce disease, liberate humans from disability, and build more sustainable ecosystems. Unwisely used or left ungoverned, biotechnology can also degrade human lives by reducing diversity, impeding innovation, and centralizing control. How should we reimagine futures in which biotechnology better serves societal visions of the good?
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- 4:15PM
Coffee Break
- 4:45PM
Conference Statement and Roundtable
- 5:45PM
- 6:00PM
Reception
This Summit is made possible through the financial support of
