The Societal Issues of CRISPR/Cas9

Engagement

Guided by curiosity we tried to establish a public dialogue beyond the lab on the societal issues on the CRISPR/Cas9 technology. We met public and stakeholders and tried to combine their contributions. What we wanted was the ability for everyone to express an opinion on science. Everyone should be able to question Synthetic Biology, professional or simple citizen. This is even more true with CRISPR/Cas9. The ethical question behind is so big every citizen should be involved. We tried to gather all of the opinion on the societal issues of CRISPR/Cas9, from different fields, but also from public and professionals. We then tried to spread this information with general audiences.

Our concern about Public Engagement is so strong we made "Inclusiveness" one of the principles of our Responsible Research and Innovation Test. To learn more about it, see our researches on Responsible Research and Innovation. When we asked to 18 teams to fill this test we saw how much inclusiveness is important among iGEM teams.

Firstly, we tried to build a strong outreach. In order to do so we did a survey in order to know how much people knew about synthetic biology and CRISPR/Cas9 and what was their feeling about it. We also made a vox pop for the same reasons. With those informations we saw what people knew about synthetic biology and CRISPR/Cas9. Thus we tried to explain more what those techniques represents through many exhibitions, at the Festival Vivant or at Nanterre University for example. Then, we learned a lot on CRISPR/Cas9 by meeting politics, scientists or patent Attorneys. We lead a lot of interviews with people working with or about CRISPR/Cas9. We learned and CRISPR/Cas9 but we also saw the great oppositions between people on science in general or CRISPR/Cas9 in particular. At last, we connected public and stakeholders during a conference on the societal issues of CRISPR/Cas9. Our lecturer were Jean-Denis Faure, professor at AgroParisTech and Pierre Walrafen, patent Attorney. In order to know more about our engagement about the societal issues of CRISPR/Cas9, click here.