For chip exports, is this mainly a question of “other countries will have a harder time getting the very latest chip designs”? (I don’t know anything about the chip export thing.) For germline engineering, I expect the technological situation to be significantly better for democratization, though not perfect. With chips, the manufacturing process is very complex and very concentrated in a couple companies; and designing chips is very complex; and this knowledge is siloed in commercial orgs. With germline engineering, most of the research is still happening in public academic research (though not all of it), and is happening in several different countries. There could definitely still be significant last-mile breakthroughs that get siloed in industry in one or a few countries, but I’d be pretty surprised if it was nearly as embargoable as chip stuff. E.g. if someone gets in vitro oogenesis, it might be because they figured out some clever sequence of signaling contexts to apply to a stem cell; but they’d probably be working with culture methods not too different from published stuff, and would be working off of published gene regulatory networks based on published scRNA-seq data, etc. Not sure though.
Yeah referring to international sentiments. We’d want to avoid a “chip export controls” scenario, which would be tempting I think.
For chip exports, is this mainly a question of “other countries will have a harder time getting the very latest chip designs”? (I don’t know anything about the chip export thing.) For germline engineering, I expect the technological situation to be significantly better for democratization, though not perfect. With chips, the manufacturing process is very complex and very concentrated in a couple companies; and designing chips is very complex; and this knowledge is siloed in commercial orgs. With germline engineering, most of the research is still happening in public academic research (though not all of it), and is happening in several different countries. There could definitely still be significant last-mile breakthroughs that get siloed in industry in one or a few countries, but I’d be pretty surprised if it was nearly as embargoable as chip stuff. E.g. if someone gets in vitro oogenesis, it might be because they figured out some clever sequence of signaling contexts to apply to a stem cell; but they’d probably be working with culture methods not too different from published stuff, and would be working off of published gene regulatory networks based on published scRNA-seq data, etc. Not sure though.