Science, Technology and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard (via Zoom)

Date: 

Monday, November 2, 2020, 12:15pm to 2:30pm

Location: 

Online Only

"Talk and Panel Discussion | Can't Stop Progress: Inevitability as Authorization in the Politics of Genome Editing"

Attend this event via Zoom (advance registration required)

Speaker:

Ben Hurlbut, Associate Professor, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University.

Discussants:

Sheila JasanoffFaculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Kris Saha, Associate Professor, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Contact:

Paul Sherman
paul_sherman@hks.harvard.edu

Co-sponsored by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.

Chair:

Sheila JasanoffFaculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Remote Access Information:

To join by computer:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduDex5bm5Oa9lp6z30zBOKxcodi171rmBi-rF6BQH-h681LA/viewform

Please note: This event requires registration by noon on Friday, November 2 to receive the meeting link and password.

Abstract:

Following the advent of CRISPR/Cas9, leading scientists expressed worries that this powerful and accessible genome editing tool might be applied to human embryos, creating heritable genetic changes in the human germline.  Even as they called for strict limits, many also asserted that heritable human genome editing was inevitable.  Several years later this prophesy was fulfilled when the world learned that a young Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, had produced babies whose genomes had been edited.  This talk will explore how an imaginary of inevitability shapes approaches to ethical deliberation and governance of emerging biotechnology, focusing on the case of human genome editing. Drawing on extensive analysis of He Jiankui’s motivations, the advice and support he received from senior figures in the sciences and government, and the reactions from the international scientific community that followed, I show how He’s project was situated within, rather than an aberration from, an approach to ethics and governance that is regulated by the presumption of inevitability.  I argue that the imaginary of inevitability is an imaginary of right governance: it asserts relations between science, technology and society that construct ethical deliberation as necessarily reactive, science as intrinsically progressive, and governance as driven by and subsidiary to technological innovation.  Predicting the inevitable illicitly authorizes science to define the parameters of deliberation even as it empowers scientists declare what the future shall be.

Speaker Bio:

J. Benjamin Hurlbut, PhD is Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.  He is trained in science and technology studies (STS) with a focus on the history of the modern biomedical and life sciences, and his research lies at the intersection of STS, bioethics and political theory.  He studies the changing relationships between science, politics and law in the governance of biomedical research and innovation, examining the interplay of science and technology with democracy, religious and moral pluralism, and public reason. He is the author of Experiments in Democracy: Human Embryo Research and the Politics of Bioethics (Columbia University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. He holds an A.B. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School.