Biotechnologies in the World: On Global Asymmetries and the Need for Cosmopolitanism

Conversations regarding genome editing are not simply about the transformative science involved. They touch upon fundamental moral questions concerning the human condition, indeed what it means to be human itself. The recent approval of a gene therapy for sickle cell disease encapsulates the relationship between scientific innovation and health care access and the relations of power and political economy that structure the world of biotech and biomedicine. Globally transformative biotechnologies must ethically situate themselves if they are not merely to reproduce longstanding historical and structural asymmetries. The time has come to embrace a cosmopolitan ethic that is attuned to the varied constitutionalisms through which debates about public good, healthy societies, and social compacts materialize around the world.