Abstract
The rapid development of CRISPR-based gene editing has been accompanied by a polarized governance debate about the status of CRISPR-edited crops as genetically modified organisms. This article argues that the polarization around the governance of gene editing partly reflects a failure of public engagement with the current state of research in genomics and postgenomics. CRISPR-based gene-editing technology has become embedded in a narrow narrative about the ease and precision of the technique that presents the gene as a stable object under technological control. By tracing the considerably destabilized scientific understanding of the gene in genomics and postgenomics, this article highlights that this publicly mediated ontology strategically avoids positioning the “ease of CRISPR-based editing” in the wider context of the “complexity of the gene.” While this strategic narrowness of CRISPR narratives aims to create public support for gene-editing technologies, we argue that it stands in the way of socially desirable anticipatory governance and open public dialogue about societal promises and the unintended consequences of gene editing. In addressing the polarization surrounding CRISPR-based editing technology, the article emphasizes the need for engagement with the complex state of postgenomic science that avoids strategic simplifications of the scientific literature in promoting or opposing the commercial use of the gene-editing technology.
Highlights
The publicly mediated ontology of the gene On July 25, 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that gene-edited crops should be regulated as genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
We argue that it is out of touch with the state of scientific debates, some of them spanning over decades and more recently culminating into a considerably destabilized understanding of the gene, for example, in the science of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements ENCODE project (Section II), which has led to complex theoretical debates about the nature of the functional gene, the gene concept itself, and the causal relation between DNA sequences and traits
The lack of an open dialogue about the complexities of the postgenomic era (Richardson and Stevens, 2015) is, we argue, contributing to a wider public backlash that is already reminiscent of the GMO debates (Shah, 2011; Macnaghten and Habets, 2020; Montenegro de Wit, 2020)
Summary
The publicly mediated ontology of the gene On July 25, 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that gene-edited crops should be regulated as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Narratives about the ease and precision of CRISPR-based gene editing are ontological in the sense that they appeal to the nature of the gene as a stable object under technological control This ontology is publicly mediated in the sense that it is strategically employed to gather public support, whether from TED talks (Doudna, 2015) to Nature News (Ledford, 2019, 2020), while circumventing decades of ontological controversy about the nature of the gene in genomic and postgenomic research (Strohman, 1997; El-Hani, 2007; Griffiths and Stotz, 2013). We discuss how this current knowledge on the nature of the gene compares with the framing of the gene in current narratives of CRISPR-based gene-editing tools
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