Gene Editing, Law, and the Environment

Irus Braverman

• 24 juli 2017
• 9781138051126

Samenvatting:

This book considers the existing scientific, legal, and political regulatory regimes that pertain to gene editing. By exploring such a range of potential applications of gene editing – not only biomedical, but also agricultural and ecological – the book reveals numerous crossovers and disjunctions between approaches to the human and the nonhuman.

Technologies like CRISPR and gene drives are ushering in a new era of genetic engineering, wherein the technical means to modify DNA are cheaper, faster, more accurate, more widely accessible, and with more far-reaching effects than ever before. These cutting-edge technologies raise legal, ethical, cultural, and ecological questions that are so broad and consequential for both human and other-than-human life that they can be difficult to grasp. What is clear, however, is that the power to directly alter not just a singular form of life but also the genetics of entire species and thus the composition of ecosystems is currently both inadequately regulated and undertheorized. In Gene Editing, Law, and the Environment, distinguished scholars from law, the life sciences, philosophy, environmental studies, science and technology studies, animal health, and religious studies examine what is at stake with these new biotechnologies for life and law, both human and beyond.