Toward Public Bioethics?

This issue of the Hastings Center Report (May-June 2017) features a couple of interesting takes on the governance challenges of emerging technologies. In an essay on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report published this February on human germ-line gene editing, Eric Juengst, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina, argues that the NASEM committee did not manage to rethink the rules. Juengst reaches what he calls an eccentric conclusion: The committee's 2017 consensus report has been widely interpreted as opening the door' to inheritable human genetic modification and holding a line against enhancement interventions. But on a close reading it does neither. In the column Policy and Politics, Sarah Chan, a chancellor's fellow at the University of Edinburgh, discusses the emerging science of organoids, embryoids, and synthetic human entities with embryo-like features and calls for a sustained effort to rethink the rules for embryo research.