CRISPR Cowboys? Genetic Self-Experimentation and the Limits of the Person

Abstract

The advent of CRISPR was heralded as signifying a new era for genetic modification (cheap! easy! DIY gene editing is here!). As issues of CRISPR’s ownership and usage rights played out in the courts (Sanders, 2017), another kind of activity has emerged on the scientific fringes. Self-experimenters with post-human aspirations have begun using CRISPR and related technologies to anti-aging ends. Some have livestreamed their efforts, in a technological confluence that would have been hard to imagine even ten years ago. Others have pursued a route closer to traditional scientific progress, seeking strategic endorsements and selectively eschewing conventions of “legitimate” experimental science. This chapter analyzes popular accounts of genetic self-experimentation, and argues that ideas about personhood, and the person-society relationship, are key. For example, some accounts suggest a hyper-individuality that assumes that what is done to one person’s body is safely contained from others’. However, the rhetoric around self-experimentation is also often deliberately contra to the scientific community’s norms, with overtly “disruptive” intentions. How should the legal community respond to these “CRISPR cowboys”? I historicize self-experimentation practices and how they may have changed with recent technological developments and consider what implications those changes have for ideas about, and governance of, personhood.