Four-cell human embryo. Wellcome Images. All rights reserved.One of the key recommendations made by the Washington DC Genome Editing Summit, held last December, was "not to stop the conversation" and called for an ongoing international debate about which 'genome-edited futures' we want. This, it said, should “not only occur among biomedical scientists, but also among policy-makers, regulators, research funders and industry representatives, as well as healthcare providers, patients and their families, people with disabilities, ethicists, lawyers, social scientists, faith leaders, public interest advocates, and members of the general public."
We have taken up the mantle of engaging as wide a public in the debate as possible by launching a self-funded pilot survey online to gauge what people think genome editing is, what it can do, and what significant ethical issues they think it poses. The survey is hosted on WhatIsBiotechnology.org, a website that gets over 1,000 page views a day from a diverse set of people from all over the world. We also invited people to participate in the survey through openDemocracy, The Conversation, The Huffington Post, Nature and BioNews, as well as through Twitter.
Launched in late October 2015, the survey asks respondents to log the degree to which they agree or disagree with seven statements, covering issues from government regulation and industry involvement to the ethics of genome editing. These could be ticked from 1 for "very strongly disagree" to 7 for "very strongly agree". Respondents were also given the opportunity to write open comments to four questions and to list key words that they associate with genome editing. So far, 359 people from around the world have completed the survey. Two-thirds of these respondents were from the United States and the United Kingdom, evenly divided between the two countries. Of the other respondents, the majority were from other European countries (the highest numbers being from Germany and France), with the remaining coming from other locations around the world or non-disclosed locations. A large proportion of the respondents indicated they were academic researchers and or had a general interest in the area.
