Human genome editing: ask whether, not how

Observatory Co-Director Ben Hurlbut argues in Nature that reaction in the wake of the reveal of He Jiankui’s CRISPR/Cas9 experiments risks presuming the inevitability of human germline genome editing. It thereby prematurely forecloses broader debate about whether germline editing should happen at all. Hurlbut highlights the Global Observatory’s efforts as one “modest experiment” to challenge this foreclosure and, following Hannah Arendt, help us build the capacities to think and speak more clearly that which we do.