Slow Science

In a chapter of her 2019 book Altered Inheritance, bioethicist and philosopher Françoise Baylis discusses how the decision the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine made not to invoke the word moratorium in their 2015 statement. This decision, Baylis argues, was partially attributable to fear of a permanent ban within the research community. However, the decision also left the door open to the softened guidance in the 2017 report released under the same National Academies initiative. He Jiankui specifically referenced this report in an application for his experimental research. In short, Baylis argues that this shifted heritable human genome editing from a question of whether to proceed to questions of when and how to proceed. Baylis situates this argument within a broader claim about the development of “fast ethics” to accompany “fast science,” an acceleration of research output that finds reduced time and funding for ethical deliberation.