If you have a system that can worry about stuff that you don’t have to worry about anymore, you can turn your attention to other possibly more interesting or important issues.
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Quite often when we’re asking these difficult questions we’re asking about questions where we might not even know how to ask where the line is. But in other cases, when researchers work to advance public knowledge, even on uncontroversial topics, we can still find ourselves forbidden from doing the research or disseminating the research.
When it comes to a field as fast-moving and as high of stakes as genetic engineering, how do we proceed wisely? How do we balance our own wildness and civility as we develop increasingly powerful ways to interact with the living world?
Talking to people who study the history of science, and you look at Nobel Prize winners, many of them have really taken sort of career-threatening risks in order to win Nobel Prizes. So even science, which feels like an area where you’re supposed to question authority and think for yourself, you actually have to be rather risk-taking and disobedient.