The Precautionary Principle: A Public Policy Tool to Support the Application of Heritable Human Genome Editing?

The Precautionary Principle (‘PP’) is a legal, ethical and regulatory chameleon. It acts as a guide to decision-making, in conditions of scientific uncertainty. Therefore, a fundamental aim of it is to offer some certainty under conditions that are largely uncertain. The advent of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (‘CRISPR’) technology epitomises an emerging technology which does not lend itself to regulatory convenience. Its far-reaching scientific, ethical, social, legal and regulatory implications, renders the task of applying a rigid, uniform framework or decision-making mechanism impossible. Unsurprisingly, the current regulatory approach for Heritable Human Genome Editing (‘HHGE’) is highly prohibitive, manifested as a blanket moratorium. However, as the technology continues to mature, it is prudent to consider pathways for its eventual legal and regulatory permissibility. Subsequently, this principle offers a means to formulate future public policy and regulation. The primary aim of this article is to advance an argument for the practical utility of this principle in supporting a therapeutic use of HHGE. Namely, to prevent Huntington’s Disease – a fatal monogenic genetic disease. As observed with somatic genome editing, it is feasible to presume the first therapeutic use of HHGE may target fatal monogenic genetic diseases (caused by a single mutation). Through the application of the framework provided by the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, this article argues this principle does not necessarily translate to a strict regulatory prohibition. In the context of emerging technologies, its application must be tempered to accommodate for research development, thereby enabling technological advancement.