Anticipatory gaps challenge the public governance of heritable human genome editing Rueda Etxebarria, Jon Segers, Seppe Hopster, Jeroen Kudlek, Karolina Liedo, Belén Marchiori, Samuela Danaher, John Anticipatory governance Heritable human genome editing Genetic enhancement Public engagement Public engagement in science and technology Techno-moral change Intergenerational techno-moral change JR thanks funding from a US-­Spain Fulbright grant, an INPhINIT Retaining Fellowship of the La Caixa Foundation (Grant number LCF/BQ/DR20/11790005), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (421523/2022-­0), and the Sabadell Foundation. JH and SM acknowledge funding from the research programme Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the Gravitation programme of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Dutch Research Council under Grant number 024.004.031. KK acknowledges funding from H2020 European Research Council (Grant Number: 851043) and support from the Croatian Science Foundation (Grant No. IP-­2022-­10-­5341). BL thanks the Spanish Ministry of Universities (grant FPU19/06027) and a US-­Spain Fulbright grant. Considering public moral attitudes is a hallmark of the anticipatory governance of emerging biotechnologies, such as heritable human genome editing. However, such anticipatory governance often overlooks that future morality is open to change and that future generations may perform different moral assessments on the very biotechnologies we are trying to govern in the present. In this article, we identify an ’anticipatory gap’ that has not been sufficiently addressed in the discussion on the public governance of heritable genome editing, namely, uncertainty about the moral visions of future generations about the emerging applications that we are currently attempting to govern now. This paper motivates the relevance of this anticipatory gap, identifying the challenges it generates and offering various recommendations so that moral uncertainty does not lead to governance paralysis with regard to human germline genome editing. 2024-07-04T08:54:03Z 2024-07-04T08:54:03Z 2024-07-02 journal article Rueda J, Segers S, Hopster J, et al. J Med Ethics Epub ahead of print: [please include Day Month Year]. doi:10.1136/jme-2023-109801 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/92968 10.1136/jme-2023-109801 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/851043 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ open access Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License Atribución-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional BMJ