With the rapid advancement of gene manipulation technology, the community is hopeful towards its vast potential. Riding on this wave, our team wanted to explore how we can harness the strengths of genome editing and yet remain vigilant to its pitfalls. Our project works on a fundamental ideal that applications will impact the society at whole, thus in order to optimize the public’s acceptance, we investigated the impacts.

In our Human Practice, we will share our commitment to understand public opinions, to practice responsible Science and to engage key stakeholders. To establish relevance, we started the process with #CasAsks where a survey was published to gather public opinion and perception on genome editing. Using the data gathered from our survey as the basis, we took #CasAsks one step further to consult expert opinion on genome editing. These experts include current scientists with strong knowledge of genome editing and Bioethicist to understand the societal impact further. This affirmed our choice to zoom into RNA editing.

Concurrently, we rolled out a multipronged public engagement effort in view of the misconceptions we collected during the survey. Our pubic engagement effort is broken down into three unique and yet concerted approach: #CasTalks (videos targeted at public), #CasTeaches (outreach talks targeted at students) and #CasWrites (discussion essays targeted at critical thinkers).

Together, these four components of our Human Practice will provide the public with a more in-depth and holistic understanding on the topic of genome editing in both the scientific advancement and its societal impact.