Symbiotic Shift: Transcultural Explorations of Community-Guided CRISPR Biotechnology Development

Abstract

This master’s thesis focuses on sharing the experience of working collaboratively across the Sculpting Evolution Group at the MIT Media Lab and Indigenous researchers, elders, and community members in Aotearoa (New Zealand) to spearhead community-guided CRISPR biotechnology development— a new way of creating the next generation of CRISPR gene editing biotechnologies that values cultural knowledge and intentionally seeks guidance from the communities that these biotechnologies may impact in the far future. Although this specific conversation focuses on ecological editing biotechnologies, it is a broader mediation on the expansion of knowledge systems used to charter the course of present and future technologies. Throughout this thesis, I weave in narratives shared by our collaborators in order to illuminate our collective learnings, challenges, sources of inspiration, and outcomes.