To contribute to the wider debate surrounding genetic technologies, the Royal Society ran a public dialogue in the UK in 2017 to explore the range of views that individuals hold concerning which potential applications for genetic technologies should be developed, why, and under what conditions.
This involved a series of workshops with members of the public to learn about their attitudes towards the possible use of genetic technologies for addressing particular challenges, such as preventing inherited diseases or increasing disease resistance in crops. This was followed by an online survey of 2000 people to test how widespread the views expressed in the workshops were.
To explore views on possible uses of genome editing to improve human health in greater detail, we reconvened a group of participants from the 2017 dialogue for a workshop on genome editing and human health in 2018.
The results from the dialogue, the workshop, and an independent evaluation of the dialogue methodology are available from the downloads section on this page.