“At the stage when steering a technology is easy, we do not know how it needs to be controlled; when we have seen it develop enough to see its problems, entrenched actors and expectations make change very difficult (Collingridge, 1980)». Le constat, connu comme le “dilemme de Collingridge » conduit Henry T. Greely, Center for Law and the Biosciences, Université de Stanford, à examiner ces difficultés à travers les 4 principales étapes de la gouvernance des technologies émergentes, en particulier celles qui mettent en jeu le vivant humain, dans  :

• L’anticipation (la veille et la prise de conscience),
• L’évaluation,
• La régulation,
• Le monitoring.

L’auteur estime que la première et la dernière étape que constituent la prise de conscience et le monitoring sont pas aujourd’hui satisfaisantes : “governance of anything—especially new technologies—cannot just happen at one point in time—it must be a process. It needs to start before a policy is debated, continue through its early testing, peak at the time of its adoption, and extend through its implementation. In technology policy we focus on the second and especially third stages, the most visible and the most dramatic moments. We should be able to do better by attending to the times before and after the two set piece moments in the middle”.

Les 4 étapes de la gouvernance des biosciences : anticipation (prise de conscience), évaluation, régulation et monitoring.

Des travaux complémentaires – d’une part de prospective afin de “scanner l’horizon”, et d’autre part de monitoring pour auditer les pratiques –   pourraient selon lui contribuer à une régulation plus efficace des biosciences.  Dans le domaine de l’anticipation : « in many areas new technologies are carefully examined and weighed for their ethical, legal, and social implications, with much of the investment coming from foundations, government grants, or from work by scholars who do not need outside funding. Work on the ethical implications of in vitro fertilization, of cloning, of human embryonic stem cell research, of functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans, and of human germline genome editing did happen, but, in most cases, only after announcements led to a shock: from Louise Brown and Dolly the sheep to James Thomson’s announcement of his creation of human embryonic stem cells to numerous neuroscience studies that garnered headlines by announcing the discovery of the brain location for true love, the feeling of mystical communication with God, or aggressive behavior. Human germline genome editing is a useful exception—and, to some extent, demonstrates what I think is a good horizon scanning endeavor ».

Une exception : le cas CRISPR Cas-9

Le domaine de la gouvernance de l’édition du genome humain germinal constitue pour H. Greely une exception notable à ces critiques.    L’ étape 1 semble avoir été respectée dans l’anticipation que la technologie CRISPR Cas-9 pourrait avoir de considérables implications : « …  CRISPR was already too established by January 2015 to truly be glimpsed at a horizon but it was only about then that the technique’s power began to become clear. The January workshop, and the resulting March publication, went beyond saying “this is a technology to watch” to provide some interim recommendations—recommendations that have largely been followed in subsequent reports—but its most important role was to force attention to the immediacy of the issue. It helped that of its 14 participants, two, David Baltimore and Paul Berg, had not only Nobel Prizes but were among the five organizers of the famous Asilomar meeting on scientific self-regulation of recombinant DNA, held almost exactly 40 years before the Napa meeting. The issue then got picked up, publicized, discussed, and analyzed by other groups“.

Les propositions d’H. Greely pour l’étape 4, l’étape du monitoring et de l’audit, sont les suivantes : “I propose the establishment of specific organizations, similar to this Global Observatory but with clearly spelled out goals, procedures, and reporting responsibilities to an umbrella organization with oversight responsibility for all of the specific groups. Technology Auditing Groups should be similar to, but somewhat different from, Horizon Scanning Groups. Like the Horizon Scanning Groups, they will need some continuity of mission and membership over time and broad credibility. In addition, they need to be small enough to be nimble and affordable“.

Quelle que soit l’organisation de la gouvernance, les prévisions restent difficiles dans le cas d’interactions entre différentes technologies,  ajoute l’auteur. Dans le domaine des chimères : « transplanting a genetically modified pig heart into a person required genetic technologies but also substantial advances in transplant techniques as well as in assisted reproduction (at least in pigs)“.

Henry T. Greely. Governing emerging technologies—looking forward with horizon scanning and looking back with technology audits.  22 aout 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-022-00045-y