On November 17, 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) published online the review article Toward inclusive global governance of human genome editing, which was byYingHuang, a young Associate Professor at our school, as the joint corresponding authors.
The collaborators included the followings:
Hanzhi Yu, Researcher at the School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University,
Lan Xue, Senior Professor of Liberal Arts, and Dean of Schwarzman Scholars, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University,
Rodolphe Barrangou, Academician of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, United States, Professor at the Department of Food, Bioprocessing, and Nutrition Sciences, North Carolina State University,
Shaowei Chen, Professor at the School of Public Administration, Hunan University.
The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Start-up Fund of "Double-tops" Talents Research Program of Wuhan University.
This research discusses the current international concerns over topic of human genome editing governance from an interdisciplinary perspective, and provides a practical and feasible global governance improvement scheme, and at the same time has reference significance for the global governance of other emerging technologies. This research compares the scientific community structure of recombinant DNA technology in 1970s with that of current human genome editing technology, and finds that the existing governance models cannot accommodate the views and opinions of different stakeholders inside and outside the academia. Through further online questionnaire survey, it is found that researchers in the field of genome editing have limited knowledge of the existing statements, declarations and other codes of practice, and their attitudes towards some key issues are quite different, and there are obvious regional differences in attitudes.
The research suggests that the global governance of human genome editing should go beyond the traditional governance model in the field of biotechnology, learn from broader global governance practices, and strive to achieve inclusive global governance.
First, leading academic journals as well as professional conferences with international influence should serve as more open and inclusive platforms for dialogue on contentious governance issues related to human genome editing.
Second, the international professional organizations developing standards and rules for human genome editing should expand their networks to include more historically neglected countries and regions.
Third, public and private funding agencies of science and medicine around the world should work together to initiate collective actions to govern human genome editing.
This paper is one of a series of research results of Ying Huang on the emerging technology of genome editing. Related research results also include the review article Collaborative networks in gene editing published in Nature Biotechnology in October, 2019, and research paper Determination of factors driving the genome editing field in the CRISPR Era Using Bibliometrics published in The CRISPR Journal in October, 2021.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) was founded in 1914, and it is the official publication of the National Academy of Sciences, United States. It published the world's leading research reports, academic reviews, subject review and prospect, viewpoint display, academic papers and academic reports of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and the collected literature covers the fields of medicine, chemistry, biology, physics, atmospheric science, ecology and social science. In 2020, the impact factor is 11.205, and the normalized Eigenfactor is 168.995. PNAS is one of the multi-disciplinary scientific journals with the largest number of articles and the highest number of citations. Together with Nature and Science, they are called the top three comprehensive academic journals in the world.
Links to the full article of the paper:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2118540118