[GLENN COHEN] So it is my great pleasure to introduce my esteemed colleague professor Sheila Jasanoff
from the Harvard Kennedy School
the key voice in science technology
studies. I think somebody has been a
wonderful intellectual agonist and
basically everything she does but in
particular in gene-editing where there
has been a lot of a smoke, some fire, but
they're not always in the same place. So
professor Jasanoff is going to speak for a
period of time and then I'm going to
join her on the dais we're gonna have a
conversation and we're gonna invite
others into the conversations let me
turn it over to Professor Jasanoff. [SHEILA  JASANOFF] Thank You
Glenn, thanks for inviting me and thank
you everybody for being here on a Friday
afternoon though it's probably better to
be out of the snow. So Glenn said I was
going to speak, I'm going to try to speak
so I should warn you in advance that
I've got this recalcitrant cough and
it's kind of unpredictable when it
chooses to act up and when not so if I
have to stop and drink tea, please bear
with me. So the idea was that I would set
the stage slightly and then we would
have a conversation with Glenn, and I was
given the small topic of international
responses to gene editing so obviously
the right way to approach this would
would have been to have a map of every
single response that fits under that
heading of international, but that's not
in fact the way that I've been
approaching it and thinking about it. So
instead I thought I would give a little
bit more of a conceptual introduction
raising the kinds of issues that I think
will need to be addressed if we ever end
up with some kind of a common convention
or common agreement on the status of
particularly the human genome, but of
course there are other genomes that
still could be thought out as
potentially common property of humankind
and how should we think about these
issues. So we are in a law place and
law likes the definitions and one
might begin with this very question of
international. So who actually defines
the space that we call international and
so far at least the discussion in this
country in the US has been led by
science, so there have been two
international summits so-called already
and they were international in that they
were organized by a troika of main
scientific research academies from three
countries: US UK and China. And these
meetings happened one in DC in 2015, and
then another in 2018 and in Hong Kong,
and that was the one that created some
of the smoke and the fire because that
was the meeting at which He Jiankui
announced that he had created these
CRISPR twins or CRISPR babies as they
have been widely called. So International
raises immediately the question about
who is defining the forum? Who is
creating the invitation lists the
process questions? How should this be
being done and not in significantly
though, What should be discussed when
we're thinking about an International
Forum at which some of the gravest
questions about ownership about rights,
responsibilities, obligations,
accountability in transforming...
potentially transforming the human
genome are under discussion at all. Now
the next thing you will not be able to
read at all from a distance but I want
just to give you a little bit of an idea
of the the organizing committee you see
the bolded names are the names of the
individuals and you see not many people
are involved and about half of them come
from Anglophone countries so the US. is
heavily represented and there's
Australia and the UK there is one person
from South Korea there's one person
from India the China representation
although it looks like a couple of
people is a little bit more intensive
when you recognize that a number of the
Anglophone researchers already have a
heavy presence in the Chinese research
world and are conducting part of their
research in China anyway.
If you did a kind of network analysis
which of course one could in various
ways you would find that the members of
this organizing committee are not
accidentally related to one another so
the names keep cropping up someone like
Robin Lovell-Badge from the UK has been
present in every genome editing meeting
someone like... well, I mean you could go
down the names on this list and discover
similar sorts of properties for a number
of people like Alta Charo for instance
from the US the after that second
international summit the committee
issued a statement as is conventionally
done at the end of any summit and there
were some interesting turns of speech
that are worth focusing on to some
extent so the first thing that they
recommended was a proposed translational
pathway so those of you who are working
on medicine related things know that the
word translational means
bench-to-bedside from idea to
application from research to clinic. It
means taking what you know and already
beginning to apply it now in the
previous summit the conclusion had been
that since the human genome is the
property not of anyone of us but of
humankind more broadly that there needed
to be the terminology was introduced by
Eric Lander of our own Broad Institute
or at least Eric takes credit for it,
broad societal consensus on how we
should proceed to work with the human
genome. That broad societal consensus
language was simply and silently put
aside so it is a real question for us if
we think about summits and their outputs
as being a kind of agreement that
implicitly people have bought into what
is the nature of the authorization that
allows the second summit simply to set
aside important verbiage from the first
summit and not provide any explanation
and instead start talking about a
translational pathway, so the
translational pathway language of course
assumes that okay the sort of basic
problems of the basic research are kind
of settled or at least we know how to
deal with them. Our attention should now
focus on the translational pathway how
to get into the clinic and how to do the
applications but if the fundamental questions of should we do this
and now how far should we go remain
unsettled then it's at the very least
premature to start talking about
translational pathways. So whether you
see this as premature or not discursive
lee in linguistic terms the second
summit simply decides that the chapter
can be closed the book can be closed and
the initial questions that were relevant
to the broad societal consensus, it's as
if they have decided okay that broader
societal consensus already exists that
they should be translation and now the
question is simply how to go forward and
they recommend in the second paragraph
an independent assessment of the
conditions under which this translation
should occur, and they also recommend an
ongoing international forum to supervise
the ethical and other dimensions risk
dimensions of the translational pathway
that they're calling for. Alright so you
know at one level it's... I mean this is
completely consistent with a kind of
biomedical model of how we go forward
when we believe that the
ethics questions are now localized between physician and patient and then you know
the question is how you have ongoing
monitoring and oversight of a set of
things they've already decided to do but
what gets swept under the carpet in this
way of going business were going about
doing business where the scientists in
effect have called the internet
international summit into being and have
decided how to frame the questions and
how to discuss the issues that are to be
put before the decision-making bodies. So
the dominant scientific narrative can be
seen as being something like this first
of all basic research presents a
different set of moral and ethical
problems from clinical research and
implicitly they say we've already dealt
with the ones that are at the basic
research end and now we need to evolve
something more of a regulatory structure
that looks at the clinical research.
Moreover, there's a presumption which you
can see over and over again in the kinds
of statements that people make that
novelty to the extent that new things,
processes, procedures, ways of intervening
are being introduced into the world
scientists are good enough at handling
that kind of novelty. As long as the
third party risks are mitigated in some
sense and those risks are seen as
physical, biological risks to health
safety and the environment. So there's a
widespread assumption that to the extent
there are risks to health safety of the
environment we do need a regulatory
structure that's when we turn to the
state but not unless those kinds of
risks exist. Moreover there's a
widespread assumption again present in
many many statements made by the members of this kind of group that the political
effects the political objections that
people often have at the threshold of
introducing new and emerging
technologies eventually take care
themselves. Those of you who've been
exposed in any way to technology studies
will recognize this as a technologically
determinist position that ultimately the
flow of the technology ends up
determining what society is willing to
accept or not that it is a general fact
that people are afraid of new things
unfamiliar things and once they get used
to it
then they accepted. A canonical example
that many of you will be extremely well
aware of is the case of in vitro
fertilization and you know when it was
first introduced you know the test-tube
baby
even the term suggested some kind of
monstrous appearance into the world and
fertility clinics, people who carry out
IVF, will often say 'look people were so
scared of this and you know initially it
was thought that only a very tiny
handful of really difficult pregnancies
would be avoided or created by these
means or supplemented by these means but
look now there are upwards of 6 million
babies being born through IVF and we
think nothing of it and there are
clinics and all kinds of countries and
and practices everywhere and our
attention has shifted to other things.' So
IVF is often told in these terms as a
story where naturalization has occurred
what we used to think of as unnatural
has now become the new natural and
people accept it because that
naturalization also makes our
understanding what is normal into
something else and therefore we no
longer see it as odd or foreign or worth
particular ethical concern. And then what
do we need so fear is evanescent it is
caused by the unfamiliar. All we need is
a bit of time and getting people you
know maybe a decent amount of
communication of exactly how these
things work and in the end people will
come around and see that they didn't
need to be afraid.
An ultimately reason will prevail and
people will converge around the utility
of
new technologies this is an exceedingly
powerful narrative it governs the
introduction of new and emerging
technologies all over the place I mean
so if you were to read about
self-driving cars and if you were to
read about gene-editing
you would find something of the same
narrative structure regardless of what
the thing is that's being introduced. And
that already should make us a little bit
suspicious because it suggests that
there are no moral differences between
technologies whether we're introducing a
new kind of energy technology whether
we're geoengineering the planners
whether we're editing the human genome
or whether we're introducing a
self-driving car that this narrative
prevails across all of them. And yet, I
think a little bit of stopping and
reflecting will suggest that that
narrative may need to be modified given
that the objectives the purposes the
endpoints are really strikingly
different across these different domains
of application so what does the the
dominant paradigm as I've laid it out
for you, the predominant set of
assumptions is tacit it's there if you
attune to it if you're looking for it if
you do research on these kinds of things
as I as I do, but equally important to
ask is what is that narrative ignore. And
there are some kind of important things
that get lost and ignored. One is that
there isn't a blank slate in fact there
are international agreements and other
bits and pieces of law and practice that
already have something to do with
editing the human genome maybe the most powerful example is the Oviedo
Convention which brought together
something on the order of 30 countries
that signed on to a version of the
Convention that includes article 13
intervention on the human genome and it
says 'an intervention seeking to modify
the human genome may only be undertaken for preventive, diagnostic, or therapeutic
purposes and only if its aim is not to
introduce any modification in the genome
of any descendants' so that
immediately blocks out germline gene
editing as a no-go territory. And one
would at least have to consider in this
translational pathway idea what to do
about those countries that simply think
you should not go there. Is it now the
ethical landscape of the world that some
countries think you should not be doing
this at all and therefore will not go
there? Whereas other countries think it's
perfectly okay to do it and they will do
it so we will have a world that's
divided between countries or places
where genome edited germline genome
edited people exist and others where
they don't exist and some places where
there is a moral barrier, other places
where there isn't. You will recognize
that the attempt to create that kind of
a world around abortion has not worked
in this country so why should it work
with genome editing it's at least worth
our thinking about in some sense. More
deeply we might ask whether the visions
of science and scientific progress that
animate what this international summit
has been doing is subject to any kind of
analysis through the lens of what I call
civic epistemologies. So it's being shown
through comparative work that countries
and cultures differ in the ways in which
they accept what is reasonable and what
counts as proof, what counts as evidence.
So for instance the whole idea of
science being independent that's encoded
into the idea of an independent
assessment of the risks and benefits of
genome editing would not be accepted in
many countries that believe that science
is always embedded in society and in
moral and political contexts and that
you shouldn't be seeking independence
you should be seeking, if anything, more
embeddedness and a deeper attempt to
canvass the different points of view
that exist in a society with regard to
science so just by using that
terminology of an independent assessment
the International summit is giving back
American civic epistemology which is
classically separated fact for value and
acted as if the domain of facts, the
domain of truth finding is completely
independent of normative substrates or
underlying normative commitments. And
then there's the question of
philosophical traditions which of course
again you in this room are well aware of
that these do go back to very different
understandings of how we weigh the
purposes and the costs and the benefits
of moving forward with something
cost-benefit analysis is not an
appropriate way to frame what the issues
are if you're in more of a deontological
framework in very basic terms are you
thinking of the benefits flowing to the
individual or are you thinking about it
in relational terms as well? So is the
risk of IVF, well sorry, of a human
germline gene editing related to the
risks to the individual genome that's
being related, that's being tinkered with
or does it depend on some set of broader
societal understandings of what it does
to familial relationships group dynamics
and even the spread of traits over an
entire population that might come into
question in some sense. So these are
issues that were simply not on the table
in the kind of deliberations that have
been had at this international summit so
just you know how can one propose a
different way of going about this. If
we are firmly convinced that the
international debates so far has been
international only through the exercise
of a kind of framing that takes some
internationalisms as being more
important than others and some forms of
debate some ways of framing questions as
more significant than others how would
we go about proposing an alternative so
the first argument that people put
forward against this is that the cat is
out of the bag
genies out of the bottle and if we don't
do it China world that seems to be the
sort of going mantra of the day. But one
has to take a position against it I mean
is the fact that someone has already
taken the lead if they have I mean
there's a factual question there as well
but just because somebody has done it
does it mean that we now have to accept
that as the new baseline there are many
many areas of regulatory law where we do
not believe that just because somebody
has gone out and done something
therefore it's okay. I mean in the area
of climate geoengineering for instance
they've been a couple of so-called rogue
attempts to go off and do experiments
that are not authorized
according to going ethical ideas about
how to intervene and the environment
those episodes have not led all of the
climate researchers to say oh it's fine
so-and-so took his iron filings out into
the Pacific Ocean and and even duped
NOAA into giving him some equipment for
doing his work but now that he's done it
it's okay we should all do it. But
nobody's saying that I mean you know so
so why do we say in the context of the
human genome the concept of slow science
has been accepted and adopted in a
variety of quarters both as a policy
idea and as an ethical idea that we
should not be conducting science
independent of the attempt to develop
the the ethical principles in accordance
with which the science should be done.
The idea of inclusive deliberation that
again has become a term of art that the
deliberation as I pointed out for the
International summit has been anything
but inclusive. Not inclusive
internationally, not inclusive
interdisciplinarily not inclusive even
intersecterally, that is patient groups
you know scholars from disciplines other
than molecular biology and so forth.
So what about the voices from the
margins which include
of those things disciplines regions
social groups and even religious
traditions that have a lot to say about
the meaning of genome editing. And then
what should the objectives of creating a
new deliberative space be and I think
one of the important things is to go
back to a very simple thing that one is
taught in policy schools that it's not
the quality of the answer that decides
on the wisdom or that determines the
wisdom of the policy it's the quality of
the question. So you can have the best
possible the most rigorous possible
answer to the wrong question and it will
still not help you solve the right
problems in the world. So are we asking
the right questions and how do we even
begin to ask the right questions if you
stick a bunch of clinical researchers
together and say what is the problem of
intervening in the human genome they
will go down the translational pathway
route because that is what they've been
taught and they will decide that these
are the things that we need to develop.
But if you go to someone who thinks that
the human genome is the work of God that
person may have a very different idea of
what to intervene in and what not so
starting points matter and I think we
have to cultivate this posture of what a
group of thinkers including myself have
referred to as radical hospitality and
that is not a kind of Rawlsian attempt
to shut out certain positions as
inconsistent with public reason but
rather to admit that there are positions
that may be extremely foreign that you
do not want to shut out simply because
the stakes are so important. We're
talking about a common future of
humankind
and that in turn would lead to a kind of
ethics that would be far more
cosmopolitan, recognizing that there are
multiple different starting points and
multiple different analytic positions
from which to start analyzing what is
implied in the attempt to tinker with
this most fundamental property that we
now recognize ourselves as having the
human genome.
So I'll just conclude this part of the
conversation by saying that what we have
proposed my colleagues and I is a what
we call a global observatory and it
would have these functions it would
enlarge the nature of representation it
would explicitly lead to an opening up
of the set of questions and it would
accommodate voices that are not present
currently in the more prominent science
led or bioethics led deliberations that
are taking place in the world. In the
conversation with the plan I'm sure in the conversation with Glenn
we'll get into this because of course
one can have a grand idea and then
people want to know the very next day
'well how you go to bring this into being'
That may not be your questions you may
have other ones, but let me conclude the
the formal part of the presentation
there, and move on to something a bit
more informal. [GLENN COHEN] So we'll definitely open it up to
questions probably part of conversation.
So Professor Jasanoff, I wanted to start
with the obsession over the what I call
the M-word of moratorium, so never before
have I thought that so many non lawyers
would obsess over a term that is very
unclear in and of itself. I can't believe
the amount of ink that has been spilled
on should we have a moratorium? Do we
already have a moratorium? What is meant
by a moratorium? What is intended? I'm
curious when you make about this level
of discourse is it just an attempt to
skirt issues by having kind of legal
formalistic sounding things. [SHEILA JASANOFF]  Thanks, Glenn
So one approach that comes naturally to
an SDS scholar and actually also to a
lawyer is to say precedent. I mean so
where else has the term moratorium been
used and how has it been used there and
even a question like do we already have
one might be tested against already
existing examples.
So there are two examples I know that
are kind of significant in this context.
One is the de facto moratorium on the
building of nuclear power plants in this
country, it was not caused by an
agreement, people nobody officially came
together, but for different reasons the
nuclear industry the public and
government agreed that there were would
not be any construction of nuclear... new
nuclear power plants and you know it's
breaking down ever so slightly but not...
not at the tune of actually creating new
sites anymore.
An additional reactor - perhaps in a
site that already exists and even then
very cautiously so what would we take
away from that example? I mean I think we
would take away that as far as the
American public is concerned fundamental
questions about what we do with the
residue that detritus if nuclear power
have not yet been resolved and a
recognition on the part of the industry
that if they try to dig a hole and build
a power plant, they would meet a kind of
resistance that would render it
impossible. With therapeutic
interventions things are more
individualized and more invisible so
whether people would rise up or not it's
a real question, but they might as in the
Jesse Gelsinger case that produced a de
facto moratorium on gene therapy and
that the other one that I was thinking
about was Asilomar of where there was an
official agreement on the part of
molecular biologists that they would
have a couple of years of moratorium and
not actually engage in genetic
engineering until they came back
together and decided how to go forward
so in the case of that moratorium the
same people that called it also ended it.
There was never a determination as to
what ought to happen in between and I
think that part of the confusion about
the moratorium and gene editing is that
nobody has actually bothered to say 'are
we talking about a politically induced
moratorium because this is a heartfelt
area where we intrude at our peril and
we may be able to get away with doing
this or that, but too many mistakes and
then the world will clamp down and we
will just not have access to the power
to develop this technology at all?' And
that could be one scenario or whether
we're saying that much more pragmatic
and instrumental thing that 'look it
worked with us a little more so let's
just placate the public by throwing them
the salve of a moratorium, suggesting
that we thought about it and then two
years later it just come back and start
doing things.' Now obviously neither fits
the model of  deliberation that you or
I might consider to be ideal in a
complex world and certainly not at the
international level either [Glenn Cohen] I think
that's very well said my next question
is about this question about what
deliberation might look like and in
particular I guess I'll framed the
question this way, One could imagine
engaging in a bunch of deliberative
democracy kinds of exercises citizen
juries there's been some that have been
done.
I guess Australia is doing a
consultation and MRT right now, there are
a few of these going on that's kind of
one model although I think it's very
nationalistic as models go I take the
global observatory idea to have a
somewhat different DNA and I want to
just to invite you to say a little bit
more about what good quality
deliberation might look like you're not
at the level of brass tacks exactly how
to implement it, but whether there are
models of things you've seen in other
areas of science or other areas of
policymaking that you like, whether you
would approve of this kind of DNA for
what you have in mind.
[SHEILA JASANOFF] Yeah thanks and I think the
observatory it's in the nature of what I
in my own theoretical universe call an
imaginary
that is I imagine it and it doesn't
exist and there isn't a real model for
exactly what it should be but it's
based on the non existences of the
world. So if you could imagine an
architecture that says look here are the
different silos that we've built and
here are the palaces and the you know
the diplomatic havens and so forth what
is not there and what would an
architecture look like that actually
brought those non-speaking spaces
together? That would be it's difficult to
imagine but there are pieces of it that
one can talk about so in our own sort
of going brand of political philosophy
we have an idea of what the rational
public sphere consists of and whether
you follow Karl Marx or whether you follow
Rawls there is a sense that some things
are just too... whether they're private or
idiosyncratic or located in particular
historical contingencies that they
should not be allowed to contaminate
some presumed world of ideal reason. So
for instance when I've presented my
comparative research on Germany and the
US in high-level meetings you know of
things like the National Academy of
Sciences saying look you know Germans
actually recognized for all practical
purposes that life begins at the moment
of conception which we have not
recognized in America as a matter of
constitutional law and yet they're
abortion policies are way more favorable
to women and way more flexible than our
abortion policies are. Shouldn't we
somehow try to understand this? And you
know somehow invariably within two
sentences somebody will say. Well it's
the Holocaust isn't it? You know so, but
that's a way of saying there is a
contingency of German history that
explains why they are the aberrant ones
and we are the rational ones and in that
sense I see my field are saying sorry
you can't
there you got estrange your own
culture and the same way your estranging
other people's cultures and begin again
from equal understandings of the
strangeness of all of these achievements
and so deliberation to me first would
require that kind of brush clearing to
establish what are the historical
prerequisites and assumptions out of
which this thing makes sense, and then we
can engage in the different forms
of sense-making and maybe we would find
areas where we do agree. I mean after all
negotiation theorists have dealt with
this for a long time not that I think
that human germline genome editing
should be given to the proponents of
getting to 'yes' I mean you know that's
that's not my idea of what the
observatory would do. But nevertheless
when I have been told with a straight
face by esteemed colleagues from this
university that they went to India and
could not find a bioethicist, right? I
mean you know look this is a tradition
that has actually produced words like
Atman that are even incorporated into
Western thought as ways of thinking
about the self I mean you know do we
really want a claim that there is no
bioethics in India or do we want to
claim that a certain thing called
bioethics has grown up in this country
that only recognizes itself and what
would happen if that bioethics were put
in conversation with a different
bioethics one that did not start in
those same places and maybe would not go
to the same places either. So you know
that is my sort of dream and vision but
I'm also as a colleague once pointed out
to me a kind of Brit pragmatist you know
maybe this is the sort of residue of the
Raj. I'm willing to take small steps and
I think that we have been doing that I
mean Glenn you yourself we're a
participant in one of those a couple of
years ago when we held a meeting here
and it come May of 2020 were organizing
a meeting in Germany that will be a
launch episode for the for the observatory where we're
going to bring together people from at
least the continental and the non
continental philosophical traditions in
order to think about issues like human
integrity and what meaning those terms
have and we had a little pilot meeting
last summer in the... of this past
summer in Berlin and two things stand
out from that meeting one of my British
colleagues said he really thinks that
human integrity is a term that should be
set aside as a term that does more damaged than
good and I wondered, ok fine, but what
does this mean that you're not going to
talk to your German colleagues who are
saying sorry we have it in the
Constitution and we gotta talk in those
terms. I mean regardless of whether you
and Britain think that this is a non
term. I mean you know that that's not an
example of radical hospitality I mean
you would need to think about it
differently and then one person said
from the German Ethics Commission that
in their new relatively recent report on
genome editing they had they said no...
unauthorised that wasn't the term... no impermissible
interventions or no impermissible
instrumentalization of the human should
be tolerated, something like that. And the
French colleague who was sitting at the
same table said I don't know what you
mean by an impermissible
instrumentalization for us all
instrumentalization is by definition
impermissible so he was a French person
talking to a German person surely coming
from broadly overlapping philosophical
traditions disagreeing on a very basic
concept of an instrumentalization and
the German person said well if you get
into an Uber car you've instrumentalized
the driver because you're giving
instructions, but you know the driver is
gaining something from serving you
and therefore it's not an impermissible
instrumentalization. Now we might then
launch into contract theory, and talk
about principal and agent, and you know
have a different analysis, a different
unpacking
of this, but it was a mini object lesson
in how even very close neighbors when
they get into deliberation and really
significant terminology will discover
differences between them that they
didn't even know they had. [GLENN COHEN] That's very
helpful I want to make sure that people
do have questions they can come up to
the mic we have a few more minutes while
people are pondering it both people have
one. I wanted to start go back to where
you started which I find very curious
you observe it and it's correct is the
amount of sweat and discussion of a
human genome editing and the lack
thereof of animal or other kinds of
entities genome editing whereas in fact
what I think is the most threatening and
the short-term and a safety terms is the
nonhuman stuff myself just because I
think it's so much more likely to be
occurring. I'm curious whether you have
views about this let's take a question
first then we are they want you go ahead,
if you have a question go ahead please. [AUDIENCE MEMBER] I have a
question on this, no oversight
process of the embryo modification
process in vitro in basic science phase
in this country. And I wonder how it
happens. Is it here because we see a
scientific narrative or the privacy for
research and for increase which was
outside with a federal regulation it's a
legal legacy or here in year the lack of
a lack of deliberation [GLENN COHEN] the
question is about the lack of oversight
in the preclinical period and why in the
United States we have so such a freehand
preclinically and the basic science side
of this. [SHEILA JASANOFF] I think that that's a very
important question and it's partly
because of a strong sense of when this
question of instrumentalization arises.
So if you're not doing clinical research
then the feeling is that you don't have
a human subject at the other end of your
intervention and we have constructed as
you know our ethics bodies to be
extremely attentive to human subjects
research I mean that is no
a very ancient formation it's actually
only since the 1970s that we've been
creating that but still in all all the
sensitivity has focused on whether you
have a human subject at the end so if
the scientists are declaring that the
embryo for instance the embryo that's
been created only for research purposes
or the embryo that does not have the
capacity to develop into a full-fledged
living being is not a human subject that
is an ontological dividing line and
therefore it is felt that you have no
ethical obligations towards this
inanimate matter you can do whatever you
want with an inanimate matter. I do think
it relates to the Glenn's question because
it relates very firmly to how we draw
the lines in the world of when we think
something is entitled to being treated
as life and when not. So you could
imagine having a different idea of the
embryo whether it develops or not you
could think that it has an intrinsic
sacredness because it is a fully formed
informational data base that could in
principle have become a human being and
so it's entitled to a different kind of
respect. You could imagine living in that
world right but that's not the world
that we live in in the U.S. we have had
this basic research applied research
separation in our policy system for a
readily at very long time it's to ensure
that scientists have relative autonomy
in deciding what research questions they
will pursue but not at the point where
they start intervening with another
human being or a potential human being
this is why the 14-day rule for instance
has been very useful to scientists
because it allows them a free hand you
know before the 14 days and not after
the 14 days and until quite recently
people have been satisfied with that but
I think that kind of ontological
boundary drawing that is some things are
entitled to respect other things are not
some forms of life a real life other
survive or not that that is where this
division begins with apologies to Phoebe
I see we're over time so I'm going to
call it quits here please a big round of
applause for Professor Jasanoff.
 
