Chapter 4 addresses the broader field of biotechnology, where two recent technological developments are highly consequential for the global politics of environmental sustainability. The first is the trend towards the utilization of digitalized genetic sequence data via big data methods. This offers novel prospects for biodiversity conservation but also threatens to undermine long-standing international commitments towards the fair and equitable sharing of benefits associated with the physical genetic material corresponding to these sequence data. The second development is novel methods for large-scale genetic manipulation of wild species, offering significant potential for conservation but at the price of unprecedented biosafety challenges. The chapter investigates the responses to these technological developments under the Convention on Biological Diversity, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, as well as the World Health Organization.

Widespread use of a biotechnology often does not occur for years after it is first introduced to the scientific community. Yet CRISPR–Cas systems, unlike their predecessor technologies, have been adopted by laboratories all around the world with unprecedented speed and used to edit the genomes of virtually every living organism. One substantial predicament about powerful technologies is that they are often prone to manipulation by speculative agents who—knowingly or not—extrapolate unfounded notions of, and spread misinformation that oversells, what is technologically feasible. This chapter provides a comprehensive, yet nonexhaustive, survey of the current and prospective applications of genome-editing technologies that faithfully tracks primary scientific sources and, thus, is firmly grounded in a jurisprudence of scientific empiricism. The chapter examines applications of genome editing in myriad fields ranging from stem-cell research, pest-population control, viral diagnostics, biofuel production, and agriculture to synthetic biology, animal research, human therapeutics, epigenome editing, digital-data recording in living organisms, and more. This exposition underscores two points. First, genome-editing technologies are not mere tools for basic research, but rather epitomize prolific mines for future significant scientific breakthroughs. Second, every technology endowed with awe-inspiring powers should be handled responsibly and with respect.