Workshop Synopsis: Emerging biotechnologies such as CRISPR and gene drives are ushering in a new era of genetic engineering. In this new era, the technical means to modify life are becoming cheaper, faster, more accurate, and more widely accessible than ever before. Gene editing technologies have already made it possible to engineer ourselves, our food animals, and our crops. More recently, they are also being developed to intentionally and rapidly alter or even drive to extinction certain species such as mosquitoes, with far-reaching implications for the management of human diseases, including malaria, dengue, Zika, and Lyme. In other words: gene editing technologies are increasingly granting humans the power to engineer life at all scales.

What kind of futures do gene editing technologies portend and what imaginaries of progress, risk, and control guide their regulation? This two-day groundbreaking workshop will bring together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines including law, philosophy, biology, ecology, anthropology, medicine, media, and the arts to contemplate the complex cultural, scientific, regulatory, and normative implications of gene editing technologies for the future of life. The participants will examine and problematize the evolving regulatory approaches to gene editing within, and beyond, the human. As part of the workshop, three of the participants will give a public lecture at the Center for the Arts, with comments and questions from the other participants to follow.

Click here for more information.