A Global Conversation

Central to the design of the Global Citizens’ Assembly is its ambition to generate a global conversation about genome editing. Our project teamed up with Genepool Productions—an Emmy-award winning production company—to film this event to capture the excitement, pressures, hard work, and intense discussions over five days.

The Global Citizens’ Assembly will be featured in a three-part science documentary series about how citizens of the world might weigh in on one of the most consequential and complicated issues of scientific ethics. The subject under examination is genome editing technology, including the revolutionary genome editing tool CRISPR.

Each episode of the documentary provokes a question,

a conundrum at its core. What’s okay? What’s not?

Like Genepool Production’s prizewinning films Vitamania: The Sense and Nonsense of Vitamins and Jabbed: Love, Fear and Vaccines, the documentary on genome editing will be beautifully crafted, illuminating, and deeply moving. Each story will build in the complexity and extend the global audience’s understanding of science and its challenges. Each episode of the documentary provokes a question, a conundrum at its core. What’s okay? What’s not?

The third and final part of the series will cover the selected jurors and their route to the Global Citizens’ Assembly. Screen time will be spent on assembly deliberations interspersed with blue-chip science shorts looking at who controls the technology and how any guidelines might be implemented.

The documentary series will have a global appeal and will be screened in various outlets including national broadcasters (currently under negotiation). It will present a compelling story of what happens when citizens from different cultures and contexts come together to deliberate on some of the most challenging ethical dilemmas in contemporary times.