What we heard at CRISPRCon: talk of designer babies, IP battles, and scientific colonialism
Here's what we picked up on at #CRISPRCon, the second annual geek-out over the groundbreaking technology.
BOSTON — While lacking the costuming of Comic-Con or revelry of SantaCon, CRISPR’s second annual geek-out dealt with a concept weightier than superheroes or public drunkenness: How should society deal with a technology that can literally reshape the world?
CRISPRcon brought hundreds of academics, industry scientists, and public health officials to Boston this week to answer just that question, moving past the beaker-and-pipette specifics of gene-editing to tackle the ethical, cultural, and democratic implications of science’s favorite new toy.
The event runs through Tuesday. Here are four things we learned on day one.
The ethics of genome-editing is still an open question
If you get a bunch of people in a
