Database
As part of its curating function, the Global Observatory collects, summarizes, and sorts resources relevant to the ethics and governance of emerging biotechnologies. Use the “Search and Filter” box on the left side of the page to navigate the resources in this database.
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2019-03
Eric S. Lander , Françoise Baylis , Feng Zhang , Emmanuelle Charpentier , Paul Berg , Catherine Bourgain , Bärbel Friedrich , J. Keith Joung , Jinsong Li , David Liu , Luigi Naldini , Jing-Bao Nie , Renzong Qiu , Bettina Schoene-Seifert , Feng Shao , Sharon Terry , Wensheng Wei , Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker
Following the reveal of He Jiankui’s experiments, Eric S. Lander and colleagues—a collection of scientists and bioethicists across seven countries—argue in favor of a global moratorium on heritable human genome editing.
2019-01
J. Benjamin Hurlbut
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.
2019
Sheila Jasanoff
In chapter 4 of the book Making Sense of Life, Observatory Director Sheila Jasanoff reflects on the challenges that new entities created through biotechnology as ‘moral grey zones’ bring to democratic societies as filled with moral questions.
2019
Françoise Baylis
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.
2018-11
David Baltimore , Alta Charo , George Q. Daley , Jennifer A. Doudna , Kazuto Kato , Jin-Soo Kim , Robin Lovell-Badge , Jennifer Merchant , Indira Nath , Duanqing Pei , Matthew Porteus , John Skehel , Patrick Tam , Xiaomei Zhai
This statement was released by the organizing committee of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong in 2018, immediately following the revelation of He Jiankui’s heritable genome editing experiments.