Ecosystems as Infrastructures?

The challenges raised by large-scale genome engineering in the nuclease age.

Conference by Prof. Rodolphe Barrangou (North Carolina State University), on new genome editing technologies followed by a Q&A session on the transformations of ecosystems and their potential integration as the infrastructures of the future.

Genome engineering have yielded important technological advances which have been successfully scaled up. The artificial synthesis of insulin is often quoted as a major progress. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted how recent techniques, such as faster DNA sequencing and mRNA vaccines, can be deployed continent-wide. As such, they have arguably passed an infrastructural threshold: herd immunity, while it has limitations, is functionally the result of a network of agents deciding that their immune systems collectively benefit from maintaining themselves as part the structure they belong to. Genome engineering techniques such as CRISPR open new perspectives in this domain. The advent of programmable nucleases raises the question of changing ecosystems on a molecular level to serve social welfare.

Moderation by Guillaume Levrier, Researcher at Sciences Po's Centre for Political Research (CEVIPOF).

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