WGS 2018: Biotech Is The Transformative Technology Of The 21st Century

Prominent thought leaders and experts discussed advancements in genome editing and biotechnology, along with their implications on society and healthcare in a series of sessions themed The Future of Health on day one of the sixth World Government Summit (WGS 2018) in Dubai.

“Biotech is the transformative technology of the 21st century. We are not just understanding our genome, we are editing it. For the first time, we are faced with science fiction-like scenarios,” said Ellen Jorgensen, co-founder and President of Biotech Without Borders, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology.

“Over the last summer, the first experiment was conducted to edit a human embryo, and this opened a can of worms,” said Jorgensen. She explained that people started questioning how this technology should be regulated, who should get access to it and a host of other concerns.

As a member of the biohacking movement that aims to encourage individuals and smaller organizations to study biology using the same methods as traditional research institutions, Jorgensen advocates democratizing biotechnology at the local level through community laboratories that not only teach the technical aspects of the science but also explain how to contextualize it.

The second session hosted renowned science journalist Jennifer Kahn who discussed advancements in Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), a genome-editing technology that enables researchers to permanently modify genes in living cells and potentially correct mutations in order to treat genetic causes of disease.