Perhaps more than any other biotech advance, Dolly [the first cloned animal] symbolized growing human power over nature. But the Dolly project was deeply troubling to most observers. Kept a close secret by the Roslin Institute and initially disclosed in a media leak in 1997, about eight months after her birth, Dolly caught everyone by surprise. At the same time, genetically modified crops were being rolled out quickly and quietly into the market. Collectively, there was a sense that the science was way ahead of the ethics.

Following the news about Dolly, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, consisting of 18 scientists and scholars, delivered a report, at President Clinton’s request, that was mainly a thoughtful parsing of religious, ethical, and legal scholarship on the issues raised by cloning and that concluded with a call for “further public deliberation.” Fifteen years later, President Obama’s bioethics commission, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, would make public deliberation and education a central theme in its reports. In following years, reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on, for example, gene drives and human genome engineering have offered up entire chapters and sets of recommendations on public engagement. In 2022, the Dana Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance neuroscience, shifted its overall focus from funding science to funding discussion of the societal implications of the science.

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