Ethical choreography in China’s Human Gene Editing controversy

ABSTRACT

He Jiankui announced to the world in November 2018 that his team had genetically edited twin human embryos that were then brought to term. Recruiting participants through an HIV outreach group and using CRISPR/Cas9 technology, He targeted the CCR5 genes claiming this would make the children immune to HIV. One way to understand He’s case is through Charis Thompson’s concept of ethical choreography, which shows how scientists ‘invent around’ potential ethical objections to their work. In particular, such a focus on ethical choreography traces how individual scientists can exploit ambiguity in institutional boundaries to recombine different logics to advance their vision of good, innovative, and ethical science. He’s actions can be seen to been the result of his traversal of blurred boundaries that demarcate science/market and science/medicine in order to recombine academic, market, medical, and cultural logics. This combination of logics is seen in ethical justifications that He put forth for his experiment, which provoked much criticism and controversy, but should nonetheless be taken seriously and placed in context. While He’s vision of good science was rejected, examples of ethical choreography can be found in other instances of biomedical innovation and there remains the potential for other scientists to pick up where He left off. Following the ethical choreography of scientists also allows for more specificity in discussions about what and when boundaries should be strengthened or relaxed in order to advance a more equitable vision of science and technology.

KEYWORDS:

• CRISPR
• gene-editing
• China
• scientific controversy
• ethical choreography
• boundary work

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Workshop at Columbia University, as well as the 2019 Annual Conference of the Society for the Social Studies of Science. I thank the audience members at these two venues, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers of SaC for their critical engagement with this piece. I also thank Ke Li, Wan-Zi Lu, and Abigail Coplin for reading a version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Larry Au

Larry Au is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The City College of New York, USA. His research examines the globalization of precision medicine, as well as the politics of expertise around Long Covid. His in-progress book project examines the aspirations of Chinese scientists to take part in global science.