Overview

Synthetic biology isn’t easy to explain to non-scientists. But explaining CRISPR-Cas9 is way harder. Not only because those matters are complex, but also because we still don’t know precisely the consequences of such technologies. If CRISPR-Cas 9 is undoubtedly a revolution, the seism affects other fields, interconnected with science (ethics or law as an example).

As our project use CRISPR-Cas9 we looked for its potential huge consequences. It seemed important for us to collect the opinion of scientists, politics, patent attorney, but also of general audience. We decided to investigate the societal issues of CRISPR/Cas9, by meeting stakeholders but also by having a strong concern on outreach. To see our researches on the societal issues of CRISPR/Cas9, click here.

As we worked on CRISPR-Cas9, we discovered how overwhelming it could be, and ask ourselves how we could imagine a responsible way to work with this technology. Thus, we tried to find an answer in the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI). We believe that this concept could help iGEM teams to think about responsability in their project. Considering our project on CRISPR-Cas9, we believed the concept could give us the good questions we should ask ourselves to build a responsible project.

This lead us to investigate about CRISPR-Cas9 and its major consequences in several fields. We tried to draw the consequences and think about what would be a responsible use for scientists but also considering the societal issues. Our Human Practices followed two goals: researching among stakeholders what would be a responsible use, and popularising science for public.

As there is no general responsible rules than can be applied to all project we developed a RRI test: this test works as a feed-back for each iGEM projects, in order to improve the responsability in the long term.

A feed-back on the responsability in a project on CRISPR-Cas9 can give a personal experience about the problematics the project met, and a quick overview on how we could deal with them.

See the RRI test: Media:T--Paris_Saclay--RRI_Test5.pdf