Imagine a world where your neighbour can engineer his own genetically modified species… would you be in favour?

Optimists say that the positives outweight the risks and that we can do that in a safe way while sceptics warn of the scary scenarios where things go catastrophically wrong. As is often the case is reality already advancing faster than many of us realize. There are biohacking communities already and the equipment to create a lab allowing to grow modified bacteria costs less than 10,000$. Time to have a conversation!

This time Sebastian and Dirk are not alone, we got the idea for the motion from students of UCL who are passionate about genetics and science communication. The conversation we had before the debate was very interesting and eyeopening, so we added it in full as well.