PHS Monday Seminar: R. Alta Charo, J.D. “Whatever Happened to Genome Editing?”

Alta Charo is the Warren P. Knowles Professor Emerita of Law & Bioethics at the UW Law School, and the inaugural David A. Hamburg Distinguished Fellow at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Abstract

In the five years BP (before pandemic), one of the hottest debates concerned the scientific and policy future of genome editing, particularly its human applications.  Although largely dropped out of the news since late 2019, both the science and the policy debates have continued to evolve.  This presentation will briefly summarize where we are in both somatic and heritable germline editing research, note forthcoming areas of application, such as epigenetic editing, and highlight as-yet unresolved questions about global governance of this powerful technology.