This essay introduces a collection of articles gathered under the theme of “law, science, and constitutions of life.” Together, they explore how revolutions in notions of what biological life is are eliciting correspondingly revolutionary imaginations of how life should be governed. The central theoretical contribution of the collection is to further elaborate the concept of bioconstitutionalism, which draws attention to especially consequential forms of coproduction at the law–life nexus. This introduction offers a theoretical discussion of bioconstitutionalism. It explores the constitutional (...) significance of interplay between scientific and technological power over life and a given political community’s shared imaginary of what modes of reasoning, judgment, and rule are proper and legitimate in a well-ordered state. It argues that knowing what life is for purposes of governance does not follow from scientific knowledge alone. Rather, such knowledge is refracted through culturally distinctive imaginaries that commit societies to particular understandings of what life means and what should be done to encourage its flourishing. (shrink)

The ability to make direct genetic changes to the DNA of future children poses profound challenges for governance: should it be done? For what purposes and subject to what limitations? And, no less importantly, who should decide? As a resolution pending in the US Senate rightly states, the prospect of editing the germline "touches on all of humanity". Given this, how should we as a human community guide and govern this emerging technology?The question of how human genome editing should be (...) governed—and by whom—has been at the heart of the debates that have unfolded over the course of the last five years.... (shrink)

On April 3, 2015, a group of prominent biologists and ethicists called for a worldwide moratorium on human genetic engineering in which the genetic modifications would be passed on to future generations. Describing themselves as “interested stakeholders,” the group held a retreat in Napa, California, in January to “initiate an informed discussion” of CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering technology, which could enable high-precision insertion, deletion, and recoding of genes in human eggs, sperm, and embryos. The group declared that the advent of a (...) technology that makes human germ-line genetic engineering plausible makes a corollary discussion of its ethical implications urgent. Echoing this sentiment, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine have announced plans to convene an international summit in fall 2015 to assess the implications of CRISPR/Cas9. Yet the notion that the advent of this particular technology is the warrant for initiating a public discussion is remarkable, and so too is the idea that the experts who have brought it into being and are putting it to use are best positioned to define the terms of the debate. The relevant ethical questions are by no means specific, let alone subsidiary, to the CRISPR/Cas9 technology. They are longstanding questions about what features of human life ought not be taken as objects of manipulation and control. They are questions about our responsibilities to our children and our children's children, where the mark of our actions will be inscribed upon their bodies and their lives. (shrink)

Genetic testing has become a vehicle through which basic constitutional relationships between citizens and the state are revisited, reaffirmed, or rearticulated. The interplay between the is of genetic knowledge and the ought of government unfolds in the context of diverse imaginaries of the forms of human well-being, freedom, and flourishing that states have a duty to support. This article examines how the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States governed testing for Alzheimer’s disease, and how they diverged in defining potential (...) harms, benefits, and objects of regulation. Comparison before and after the arrival of direct-to-consumer genetic tests reveals differences in national understandings of what it means to protect life and citizenship: in the United Kingdom, ensuring physical wellness through clinical utility; in the United States, protecting both citizens’ physical well-being and freedom to choose through a framework of consumer protection; and in Germany, emphasizing individual flourishing and an unburdened sense of human development that is expressed in genetic testing law and policy as a commitment to the stewardship of personhood. Operating with their own visions of what it means to protect life and citizenship, these three states arrived at settlements that coproduced substantially different bioconstitutional regimes around Alzheimer’s testing. (shrink)

This paper examines political norms and relationships associated with governance of pandemic risk. Through a pair of linked controversies over scientific access to H5N1 flu virus and genomic data, it examining the duties, obligations, and allocations of authority articulated around the imperative for globally free-flowing information and around the corollary imperative for a science that is set free to produce such information. It argues that scientific regimes are laying claim to a kind of sovereignty, particularly in moments where scientific experts (...) call into question the legitimacy of claims grounded in national sovereignty, by positioning the norms of scientific practice, including a commitment to unfettered access to scientific information and to the authority of science to declare what needs to be known, as essential to global governance. Scientific authority occupies a constitutional position insofar as it figures centrally in the repertoire of imaginaries that shape how a global community is imagined: what binds that community together and what shared political commitments, norms, and subjection to delegated authority are seen as necessary for it to be rightly governed. (shrink)

Biobanks are custodial institutions that enhance the utility and value of biological materials by collecting and curating them. Their custodial functions tend to include ethical oversight and governance. This paper explores how biobanks increase the value of biological materials by standardizing routines of governance in order to engender “ethical efficiency.” Focusing in particular upon banking of human embryos for research, the article offers an historical account of how human embryos came to be “waste” available for use by researchers in the (...) US. It offers a case study of a human embryo biobank and the practices of ethical governance that the biobank employs to capture this waste and convert it into a valuable resource for research use. The article draws attention to the ways biobanks’ emphasis on efficiency and resolving problems of ethical governance up front codifies otherwise contested normative relationships and authorizes uses of human biological materials that some see as ethically problematic, even as it eliminates institutionalized mechanisms of reflection in which such problems would otherwise be acknowledged and confronted. (shrink)

Humans have always imagined better futures. From the desire to overcome death to the aspiration to dominion over the world, imaginations of the technological future reveal the commitments, values, and norms of those who construct them. Today, the human future is thrown into question by emerging technologies that promise radical control over human life and elicit corollary imaginations of human perfectibility. This interdisciplinary volume assembles scholars of science and technology studies, sociology, philosophy, theology, ethics, and history to examine imaginations of (...) technological progress that promises to transcend the constraints of human body and being. Attending in particular to transhumanist and posthumanist visions, the volume breaks new ground by exploring their utopian and eschatological dimensions and situating them within a broader context of ideas, institutions, and practices of innovation. The volume invites specialists and general readers to explore the stakes of contemporary imaginations of technological innovation as a source of progress, a force of social and historical transformation, and as the defining essence of human life. Contents Technological Imaginations.- Ethics and Politics of Envisioned Futures.- The Transhumanist Imagination in Context. Target Groups Scholars and students in science and technology studies, philosophy, utopian studies, science and religion The Editors Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism and Director of the Center of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. J. Benjamin Hurlbut is Assistant Professor of Bioscience Ethics in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. (shrink)

As Achim Rosemann and colleagues rightly suggest in their article “Heritable Genome Editing in Global Context: National and International Policy Challenges,” in this issue of the Hastings Center Report, the scientific, ethical, and governance challenges associated with heritable genome editing are global in scope. Both the genetic interventions and the social and moral judgments about human identity and integrity associated with them will affect all humanity. Yet the worries, problems, and solutions that the study illuminates reflect only a partial picture (...) of those challenges. That is to be expected from a study of this sort: the “stakeholders” who were consulted are a limited group and as such are bound to provide a particular, limited picture. One of the important contributions that such a study can make is in providing a picture of what problems particular kinds of experts see as the primary problems and how the framing of those problems may displace other questions and perspectives, especially when such parochial framings of problems are elevated to the level of the “global.” Rosemann et al. do not explain how participants were identified as stakeholders or, indeed, how the study identified the stakes. This is a missed opportunity, and it points toward a set of questions that themselves need to be asked about how the stakeholders—and the stakes—of global governance of heritable genome editing are identified. (shrink)