While CRISPR/Cas9 has become a lightning rod for fears about humanity’s increasing capacity to engineer biological life, the mainstream of Anglo-American bioethics struggles to discern much wrong with genome editing of human beings in vitro. In this paper, we analyze the notion of biopolitics and consider what contribution it may make to debates on genome editing. We disambiguate the different senses of two key terms: ‘biopolitics’, and ‘life’, and try to show how particular authors in the biopolitics literature draw on and emphasize different versions of these concepts. In the final section of the paper, we venture some suggestions as to the contribution that a number of these approaches might make to moving beyond a focus on risk and individual liberty to address the urgent bioethical questions surrounding the use of CRISPR/Cas9 to edit the human genome.

尽管CRISPR / Cas9已成为人们对人类不断提高的生物生命工程能力的担忧的避雷针，但英美生物伦理学的主流仍在努力辨别人类体外基因组编辑的许多错误。在本文中，我们分析了生物政治学的概念，并考虑了它可能对基因组编辑的辩论做出什么贡献。我们消除了两个关键术语的不同含义：“生物政治学”和“生命”，并试图说明生物政治学文献中的特定作者如何借鉴和强调这些概念的不同版本。在本文的最后部分，