Envisioning Complex Futures: Collective Narratives and Reasoning in Deliberations over Gene Editing in the Wild

The development of technologies for gene editing in the wild has the potential to generate tremendous benefit, but also raises important concerns. Using some form of public deliberation to inform decisions about the use of these technologies is appealing, but public deliberation about them will tend...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Hastings Center report
Authors: Wills, Ben Curran (Author) ; Gusmano, Michael K. (Author) ; Schlesinger, Mark (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Wiley 2021
In: The Hastings Center report
Year: 2021, Volume: 51, Pages: 92-100
Further subjects:B narrative fluency
B Narrative
B narrative transparency
B Bioethics
B democratic deliberation
B crafted narratives
B gene editing
B public deliberation
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Summary:The development of technologies for gene editing in the wild has the potential to generate tremendous benefit, but also raises important concerns. Using some form of public deliberation to inform decisions about the use of these technologies is appealing, but public deliberation about them will tend to fall back on various forms of heuristics to account for limited personal experience with these technologies. Deliberations are likely to involve narrative reasoning—or reasoning embedded within stories. These are used to help people discuss risks, processes, and fears that are otherwise difficult to convey. In this article, we identify three forms of collective narrative that are particularly relevant to debates about modifying genes in the wild. Our purpose is not to privilege any particular narrative, but to encourage people involved in deliberations to make these narratives transparent. Doing so can help guard against the way some narratives—referred to here as "crafted narratives"—may be manipulated by powerful elites and concentrated economic interests for their own strategic ends.
ISSN:1552-146X
Contains:Enthalten in: Hastings Center, The Hastings Center report
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1002/hast.1325