Author: Julia Brown, Assistant Professor of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of California, San Francisco

With their primary goal to advance scientific knowledge, most scientists are not trained or incentivized to think through the societal implications of the technologies they are developing. Even in genomic medicine, which is geared toward benefiting future patients, time and funding pressures make real-time ethics oversight difficult. In 2015, three years after scientists discovered how to permanently edit the human genome, U.S. scientists issued a statement to halt applications of germline genome editing, a controversial type of gene editing where the DNA changes also transfer to the patient’s future biological descendants.The scientists’ statement called for “open discussion of the merits…