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As applied to less economically advantaged countries, and African countries especially, gene editing advances a “Second Green Revolution,” where intensification is seen as vital not only for food production but for modernization and economic development ( Conway, 1998 Ickowitz et al., 2019). In these fora, gene editing supports a larger paradigm of Sustainable Intensification, which proposes to increase yields while reducing the energy-dependency and biodiversity costs of industrial farming ( Royal Society, 2009 Pretty et al., 2018). While early research focused on proof of principle in a few cultivated species such as wheat ( Upadhyay et al., 2013 Wang et al., 2014), rice ( Shan et al., 2013 Zhou et al., 2014), and tomatoes ( Brooks et al., 2014), in the past five years, science has turned to agronomically relevant traits: boosting resistance to viral and bacterial diseases, enhancing drought resilience, eliminating natural toxins in root crops, creating hybrids through clonal seeds, and accelerating the domestication of wild plants ( Borrelli et al., 2018 Gomez, 2019 Khanday et al., 2018 Lemmon et al., 2018).ĬRISPR has also entered into debates about “feeding the world.” Contrasted to classical plant breeding on one hand and conventional GM technology on the other, gene editing figures prominently in the World Economic Forum’s “Innovation with a Purpose” Initiative ( WEF, 2018), the National Academy of Science’s “Breakthroughs to Advance Food & Agriculture Research by 2030,” ( NASEM, 2019), and the World Resource Institute’s report, “Creating a Sustainable Future” ( Searchinger et al., 2019).
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It has been shown to work in a tremendous variety of organisms from the simplest of soil microbes to complex organisms including insects, plants, fish, animals, and people.
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1 It has suffused fields from basic biological research to human therapeutics, wildlife conservation, military/defense, and agriculture. Since its discovery in bacteria by Barrangou in 2007 and development into a genome editing tool by Doudna and others in 2012, CRISPR-Cas9 has been heralded by the research community as “breakthrough” technology ( Science 2012, 2013, 2015). Increasingly many scientists, journalists, and business entrepreneurs are invoking the discourse of democratization. By gathering multiple, partial knowledges together, we move beyond narrow risk-benefit framings to better evaluate not just what CRISPR is and does, but what democracy means and whom it serves.Īnd it’s not just CRISPR pioneers. I conclude with a set of principles and practices for CRISPR governance based on the idea that democratization of biotechnology requires epistemic justice. Next, I argue that “created spaces,” in which power is held by typically delegitimized actors and ideas, offer an opening for working out democracy on the terrain of biotechnology. Third is governance, where I contrast US Department of Agriculture regulations and the CRISPRcon conference as “closed” and “invited” spaces, respectively, for democratic participation. First is democratizing discourses: On what grounds is CRISPR said to be democratic? Who is saying so? How do dissident communities respond to these narratives? Second is agricultural applications, with a focus on the Innovative Genomics Institute’s work in developing gene-edited food crops, including a case of saveable clonal hybrid rice. I use Science and Technology Studies and political ecology lenses to unpack democratization in three main parts. In this paper, I draw on semi-structured interviews with gene editors, policy analysts, and communications experts as well as with critical academic and civil society experts. But the high-profile, explicit, and assertive discourse of democratization with gene editing - especially CRISPR-Cas9 - is something new. Many trends in agricultural biotechnology have extended fluidly from the first era of genetic modification using recombinant DNA techniques to the era of gene editing.