“Democratizing” Biotechnology: Institutional Constraints on Participatory Governance in Genetic Engineering

• In Event: Interrupting Innovation: Pausing to Examine New Biotechnologies - II

Abstract

Biomedical researchers, bioethicists and STS scholars have made calls for more democratic and deliberative forms of governance around genome-editing technologies. Despite these calls, ongoing governance efforts tend to revert to oligarchic forms of decision-making. In order to explain this tension and historicize the constraints on deliberative approaches to science and technology governance in genome editing, we analyze processes of decision-making surrounding two genetic engineering technologies: recombinant DNA (rDNA) and the CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing system.
Using archival and historical sources, we first describe the development of practices of expert decision-making in the 1970s. During this period, scientists addressed concerns over the uses of emerging biotechnology by convening conferences of experts and organizing small committees made up of regulators and academic researchers. Through these conferences and committees, expert groups produced technical guidelines that would govern rDNA technology to effectively preserve the autonomy of both academic science and the emerging biotechnology industry.
To show how these practices are being reproduced by researchers in genome editing, we then draw from interviews with participants of early conversations about the ethical and social concerns of CRISPR-Cas9. These interviews underscore the way institutional constraints bring democratic ideals into tension with practices of self-governance and become internalized by scientists. Our descriptive account further illustrates how pushes toward deliberation and democratic modes of decision-making in genome editing are undermined by institutional structures in contemporary science; including, hierarchies within departments and between disciplines, systems of reward and credit, and technocratic recruitment to committees.

Authors

• Santiago Jose Molina, University of California Berkeley

• Gordon Pherribo, Mr.