Biotechnologies are poised to alter the meaning of being human. Genome editing, especially of the human germline, raises fundamental questions of the dignity and integrity of human life. Governance concerns once focused on the escape of lab-created organisms posing risks to health and safety. Today, in a time of heightened skepticism, the most urgent concerns relate to transgressing moral boundaries and understandings of human integrity. The scientific and technological frontier is also a frontier of human values, carrying implications for all planetary life. The Observatory’s 2025 Summit foregrounds these developments and seeks to expand the range of human experience and perspectives that must have a voice in the governance of emerging biotechnologies such as human genome editing. It aspires to craft new foundations for deliberating on emancipatory human futures. 

In keeping with the Observatory’s mission, the 2025 Cambridge Summit will complement the three International Summits on Human Genome Editing held in 2015, 2018, and 2023. Rather than focus first on emerging breakthroughs in science and technology, the Summit explores multiple understandings of the meaning of being human—cultural, legal, religious, and scientific—and their implications for projects in biotechnology. The hope is to lay the groundwork for a global social compact that addresses, and seeks to rectify, the asymmetric distribution of benefits and harms and of the resources that order global science and technology today. It hopes to foster a mode of cosmopolitan deliberation that affirms diverse ethical framings of what is at stake at the frontiers of innovation. It seeks to advance mutual understanding and humility about uncertain futures in place of the confident univocality engendered by a narrow focus on molecular breakthroughs.