Heritable human genome editing: making ‘societal dialogue’ meaningful

The Consensus Study Report of the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing, produced by an international commission convened by the US National Academies of Medicine and Sciences and the UK’s Royal Society, is careful to state that its focus is firmly on the scientific and technical sides of heritable human genome editing (HHGE) rather than the social and ethical. Although other commentators have properly pointed out the artificiality of that divide and the implausibility of a science untouched by social and ethical values, it is nevertheless a step in the right direction of acknowledging that HHGE’s ethical and social implications are of a scale that requires something more than a couple of chapters tucked in at the end of a report.

The Consensus Study Report still has much in common with earlier reports that gave more houseroom to ethical issues, including the National Academies’ earlier (and broader) Human genome editing: science, ethics, and governance (2017) and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ own two reports, Genome editing: an ethical review (2016) and Genome editing and...