Gene Editing, “Cultural Harms,” and Oversight Mechanisms

Is it reasonable to hope that concerns about “cultural harms” can be integrated into oversight mechanisms for technologies like gene editing? That question was raised anew for me by the recent National Academy of Sciences report on human genome editing and at a recent conference at Harvard on the international governance of genome editing technologies. I’m somewhat disheartened to be thinking that the answer might be no.

Before explaining how I ended up in what is, for me, a disheartening place, I should clarify what I take the authors of the NAS report to mean by the term “cultural harms.” First, they were not emphasizing that concerns about emerging technologies can vary from culture to culture or from nation to nation. They weren’t talking about how, say, Samoans and Singaporeans hold different values, and about how such differences might make international governance difficult.

They were using “cultural harms” in contradistinction to what we might call “physical harms.” When we worry about physical harms we worry that a technology is going to fail at achieving some near-term purpose we take to...