Gene editing craze

Gene editing craze

Huirong Sun

University of California, Santa Barbara

Instructor: Valentina Fahler

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Gene editing craze

On November 2018, the news that a Chinese scientist, Jiankui He, claimed to

make the world-first genome-editing twin babies caused a huge uproar.(Cyranoski, D.,

& Ledford, H., 2018) Suddenly, news about “What is gene-editing?” “Is gene-editing

a key technology for human evolution or the sickle of Death?” popped up all over the

places. This phenomenal surging of gene-editing news, the horror and panic it caused,

and heated discussions behind it all show that most of the public are lack of

knowledge in this breakthrough technology. In fact, scientists from different fields

have tried to give the public some sense of this topic ever since it first came out. So in

the following paragraph I chose to analyze two academic journal on gene-editing: one

from the biology standpoint, “The CRISPR craze”(Pennisi, 2013), and the other from

the sociology perspective, “Public views on gene editing and its uses”(Gaskell, 2017).

By analyzing and comparing their use of arguments and evidence, I concluded that the

author from “Public views on gene editing and its uses” did a better job on conveying

the ideas of gene-editing to the public.

In the paper “The CRISPR craze”(Pennisi, 2013), Pennisi focuses on the

development and history of the technology itself. By analyzing the advantages and

limitations during its evolution process, she comes to the conclusion that this

technology has potential and will have a promising future. On the other side, in the

sociology research article, Gaskell elaborately explains the experiment he designed

and conducted to get the public views on the application of this technology. By

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evaluating the public perspectives on gene-editing in a statistics method, he stated his

argument that the public should not interrupt the development of this technology.

As the professor at University of Nevada Reno once stated “Disciplines are

separate language communities with their own values, purposes, and forms for

writing.”(Melzer, 2011) Even though the biologist and sociologist both choose an

overall positive standpoint under this circumstance, the approaches they used to reach

their argument are quite different. On one side, even though we could easily find

citations from other scientists in Pennisi biology article supporting her overall positive

attitude, like “...Barrangou says ‘The only limitation today is people’s ability to think

of creative ways to harness[CRISPR]’ ” .(Pennisi, 2013), we could barely find direct

arguments provided by herself. In other words, the argument made in the biology

disciplines is built on the words of other people. On the other side, Gaskell stated his

argument “Public opinion cannot and should not tell us what is right to do ”(Gaskell,

2017)in a clearly straightforward way to help audiences understand.

That does make sense. Most of the biology studies and researches are based on

work previously done by other researchers. And researches on the gene-editing, or

any other cutting edge technologies in the biology field, is kind of like constructing

the top of a pyramid. We cannot simply get to the top of the pyramid without going

through the pyramid beforehand. So it is normal, or even necessary, to include work

and arguments from other scientists in biology papers. It’s also a proof that the points

writers made are solid and credible. However as a different discipline, sociologists

focus more on independent researches that may have loose connection between one

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and another. It’s just easier for them to make an argument directly. Such different

strategies within different disciplines could have different impact on the readers,

especially for most of the public like us. In order to understand the “top” argument in

the biology articles, we have to understand all parts of the “pyramid” we need to go

through. Indeed for scholars and experts, it’s a good way to check if the argument

made eventually is credible or not. But for readers like us, it will stop us from

identifying the arguments and taking a closer look at the topic. To conclude, the

sociologists present the arguments for the public in a more effective and clearer way.

Both authors choose to use experiments as one of the most important source to

prove their arguments. The main evidence used by the sociologist is the experiment he

designed and conducted. According to the author, they “conducted online quota

sample surveys....to elicit judgments about gene editing using the contrastive vignettes

method...”(Gaskell, 2017, p1021)Gaskell specifically elaborates the whole process of

the experiments to build his credibility and professionalism. And by showing these

details, Gaskell publicizes the experiments not for me but for other colleagues and

scholars within sociology community discourse to repeat and analyze. Pennisi also

presents experiments as her evidence. Instead of using her own experiments, Pennisi

chooses to use secondary experiments sources from published research papers, and

works from influential scholars in gene-editing areas. She uses experiments done by

pioneering scientists in this field for several times. Overall, both of the articles

successfully build their credibility from the use of the experiments as a main evidence.

However, different approaches to their arguments lead to different ways the

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author use to explain the evidence. From the biology article, Pennisi states the

experiments, explains it a little bit, and moves to the next experiments. It seems that

Pennisi just presents you with the truth, and let the truth do the rest of the talk itself.

We could barely find comments or personal opinions through the use of all the

evidence. That does match the characteristics of biology science community discourse.

Scientists within this field pay more attention to the technology itself and tend to play

objective spectator roles for most of the times. On the contrary, the arguments Gaskell

made in his article largely depend on how he explains the data and results from the

experiments he made. Since different sociologists may get to different conclusions

from the same results and data, it’s important to make reasonable personal comments

from the authors’ own perspectives to persuade the audiences.

These different explanations for evidence could also effect the readers. Even

though the presence of truth could be really powerful, when it faces to audiences with

little knowledge of this topic, this power could disappear. When you just throw a hard

cold fact in someone’s faces, especially someone could not fully understand the

power behind the fact, logos no longer have any effect. On the other hand, the

sociologists are well acquaintance with the tricks to attract their readers and make

them agree with the arguments. For example, in the article Gaskell stated that “This

harks back to the old struggle between regulating the process (the technology) or the

applications (uses of the technology) that has caused so many problems for

agricultural biotech in Europe” (Gaskell, 2017)By comparing the fact of Europe

agricultural technology problems to the gene-editing technology problem we are

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facing today, Gaskell does a good job evoking the audiences emotion, to make them

feel related and positive to the gene-editing technology. “Like Kate pointed in her

article “I need you to say ‘I’”(n.d.), avoiding personal pronouns or statements can

help writers to be objective, but there are still a lot of times that we need to be less

objective and get closer to our readers. So although two paragraph use similar type of

evidence, the sociology article is more effective in explaining the evidence for the

general public.

After analyzing the arguments and use of evidence in both articles, it’s pretty

clear that the sociology one does a better job in presenting its arguments and

connecting to the public audiences. That’s why I think this article is more effective to

conveying the ideas of gene-editing to more people who have little or no knowledge

in this area. Making academic topic effective to spread ideas for general public may

be hard due to all kinds of limits different disciplines have in their communities.

However, it’s still worth studying how to convey the academic ideas that actually

close related to ourselves for the public.

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Reference

Cyranoski, D., & Ledford, H. (2018). Genome-edited baby claim provokes

international outcry. Nature, 563(7733), 607-608.

Pennisi, E. (2013). The CRISPR craze. Science (New York, N.Y.), 341(6148),

833-836.(biology)

Gaskell, G., Bard, I., Allansdottir, A., Da Cunha, R. V., Eduard, P., Hampel, J., . . .

Zwart, H. (2017). Public views on gene editing and its uses. Nature

Biotechnology, 35(11), 1021-1023. doi:Melzer, D. (2011).

Kate, Mn Maddalena. I need you to say “I” : why first person is important in college

writing

Melzer, D. (2011). Exploring college writing : Reading, writing and researching

across the curriculum (Frameworks for writing). Sheffield ; Oakville, CT:

Equinox Pub.