The authors argue that the explanation for this paradox cannot be found in the biology of the edited plants themselves. Instead, they contend, it lies in the way the technology is embedded within broader social structures. To make that argument, they reach back several decades, before CRISPR was invented, to the work of the German-born Canadian physicist and philosopher of technology Ursula M. Franklin, who lived from 1921 to 2016. In her book The Real World of Technology, first delivered as lectures in 1989 and published in 1990, Franklin developed a framework that the Freiburg researchers believe helps explain why genome-edited crops have met such different receptions on either side of the Atlantic and across sectors of application.

Franklin’s central insight was that technologies are never merely tools. In her view, every technology is in fact an entire system, shaped jointly by regulation, markets, institutions and culture. A genome-editing enzyme such as Cas9 is, on this reading, only the visible tip of a much larger formation that includes patent regimes, seed markets, food-safety authorities, agricultural traditions, media narratives and consumer expectations. Franklin’s work explored how such technological systems influence power, authority and everyday life, and in this respect her thinking echoes ideas developed earlier by social historians and philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, all of whom analyzed technology as a force that organizes society rather than a neutral instrument within it.

Applying this framework to CRISPR reveals why the risk-based argument familiar from plant science has failed to settle the debate. European regulation of genome-edited plants has its origins in a 2018 ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which held that organisms produced by new mutagenesis techniques fall within the scope of existing genetically modified organism legislation. That judgment entrenched a regulatory pathway built on traceability and labelling requirements established for transgenic organisms, including the traceability and labelling framework laid down by European rules from 2003. Under such a system, a plant whose genome differs from a conventionally bred counterpart by only a small deletion or point mutation can nonetheless be classified, tracked and labelled as a genetically modified organism, even though the molecular outcome is one that traditional breeding could also have produced.

From a technical standpoint, the distinction is indeed difficult to defend on scientific grounds. Genome editing with CRISPR–Cas typically introduces small insertions, deletions or base substitutions at targeted loci. Conventional mutagenesis breeding, which has been practiced for decades using chemical or radiation treatments, produces random mutations across the genome and is exempt from the strict genetically modified organism rules in many jurisdictions. Site-directed nuclease editing is, in effect, a more precise version of mutagenesis, with far fewer unintended changes to monitor. The 2014 analysis by Frank Hartung and Jürgen Schiemann, cited in the commentary, examined precisely these questions of equivalence and risk. Yet, as the Freiburg team emphasizes, the regulatory treatment of a product does not track its biological properties but its production process—a decision that is legal and political rather than scientific.

The policy landscape, however, has begun to shift. In 2023 the European Commission put forward a proposal for a regulation on plants obtained by certain new genomic techniques and their food and feed, seeking to differentiate between categories of genome-edited plants according to the type of genetic change involved. That process culminated in June 2026 with Regulation (EU) 2026/1388 on plants obtained by certain new genomic techniques and their products, which amends the earlier 2017/625 regulation on official controls. This legislative move represents an attempt to build a more differentiated system, one that can distinguish targeted edits indistinguishable from conventional breeding outcomes from more extensive modifications. For the commentary’s authors, the episode illustrates Franklin’s point in real time: the technology’s fate is being decided not in the laboratory but in the architecture of rules, institutions and market arrangements that surround it.

What, then, would a sustainable innovation system for CRISPR in plant science look like? The commentary’s argument suggests several components. First, regulation must be technically coherent, meaning that the category into which a plant falls should reflect the nature and scale of the genetic change rather than the method used to create it. Second, transparency and traceability need to serve public trust rather than functioning as ends in themselves; if consumers cannot see how decisions are made, labelling schemes risk becoming symbolic battlegrounds rather than informative tools. Third, the benefits of the technology must be distributed in ways that farmers, breeders and consumers can recognize, since an innovation system that concentrates value in a few patent holders is unlikely to sustain broad social license. Fourth, public engagement has to treat citizens as participants in shaping the system, not merely as audiences to be persuaded of its safety.

The contrast between medicine and agriculture sharpens this point. In therapeutic applications, genome editing is evaluated within a well-established institutional framework of clinical trials, ethics committees and health technology assessment, and it addresses conditions that individual patients and their families experience as urgent and personal. In plant breeding, by contrast, the same molecular intervention is situated within agricultural systems marked by long-running debates over industrial farming, seed ownership, pesticide use and the concentration of the food supply. The technology is not judged in isolation; it inherits the anxieties and political commitments attached to the system it enters. Franklin’s framework makes this inheritance explicit, and it explains why campaigns that focus exclusively on communicating the molecular facts have repeatedly failed to move public opinion in the European agricultural context.

The economists’ perspective adds a further layer. The commentary invokes Kenneth Boulding, whose work on economic imagery and evolution emphasized that societies live by narratives and images as much as by material flows. Genome-edited plants, in this light, compete not only on agronomic performance but on the story they are embedded in—are they a continuation of human stewardship of crops, or an escalation of corporate control over the food chain? Building a durable innovation system means attending to that narrative infrastructure deliberately: who is seen to benefit, who is seen to decide, and what risks are seen to matter. The authors’ use of Franklin and Boulding signals that the scientific community must engage these questions on their own terms rather than dismissing them as misunderstandings of the science.

Ultimately, the Freiburg commentary makes a claim that reaches beyond plant biology to the governance of emerging technologies in general. CRISPR–Cas is a genuinely transformative tool, capable of precise, targeted and increasingly diverse genetic interventions, and its technical trajectory continues to accelerate. Whether that capability translates into societal benefit in agriculture depends on assembling the surrounding system—regulation, markets, institutions and culture—into a configuration that is scientifically sound, economically viable, socially trusted and ethically defensible. The new European regulatory framework of 2026 offers an opening, but the deeper lesson from Franklin is that no single ruling settles the matter. A sustainable innovation system is not a finished artifact but an ongoing practice of aligning technological capability with public values, and the genome-editing debate in plant science is now one of its most instructive real-world tests.

Subject of Research: Societal and regulatory dimensions of CRISPR genome editing in plant breeding

Article Title: CRISPR beyond biology: building a sustainable innovation system

Article References: Barbez, E., Boldt, J., & Kleine-Vehn, J. (2026). CRISPR beyond biology: building a sustainable innovation system. Nature Plants, 12(9), 1648-1649. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-026-02410-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41477-026-02410-9

Keywords: CRISPR, genome editing, plant breeding, Ursula Franklin, EU regulation, new genomic techniques, agricultural biotechnology, science policy, public acceptance, GMO legislation, innovation systems, Nature Plants

The study, led by Sophie van Baalen, Thomas Verra and Michelle Habets of the Rathenau Instituut in the Netherlands, together with colleagues at Wageningen University and Erasmus MC, conducted nineteen semi-structured interviews with scientists working in academia and industry between September 2023 and January 2024. Fifteen of the respondents were academic researchers and four worked for commercial companies, with expertise spanning biomedical research, plant science and microbiology. Using snowball sampling and thematic analysis with Atlas.ti software, the team captured the views of researchers across ten European countries and one respondent from the United States, continuing recruitment until no new themes emerged from the transcripts.

The technical logic behind epigenetic editing explains much of its appeal. Unlike CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, which slices both strands of the DNA double helix to alter the genetic sequence, epigenetic editing tools such as CRISPR-dCas9 and zinc finger proteins bind to specific DNA sequences without cutting them. Instead of changing the letters of the genetic code, they attach or remove chemical marks on the DNA and its associated proteins, dialing gene activity up or down. Because no DNA breaks are introduced, researchers assume the risk of genomic instability is dramatically reduced. Off-target effects, a persistent worry in gene editing, are viewed as less dangerous in the epigenetic version because misplaced edits do not coincide with strand cuts and may fade over time as the cell’s own machinery reverses the marks.

Respondents also described epigenetic editing as fundamentally more subtle than gene editing. Where gene editing acts like a binary switch, introducing or eliminating genetic functions outright, epigenetic editing was compared to a thermostat that fine-tunes the volume of gene expression. Because cells naturally modify their epigenome constantly as part of ordinary biology, scientists framed the technique as working with, rather than against, the cell’s native processes. Several researchers contrasted this precision favorably with epigenetic drugs, a class of therapeutics that targets epigenetic enzymes broadly and is notorious for lacking specificity. One interviewee emphasized the absence of the translocation problems and genetic instability that plague strand-cutting technologies, noting that unlike base editing, prime editing or conventional gene editing, epigenetic editing never cuts the DNA at all.

Yet the same scientists who endorsed this dominant vision simultaneously questioned its foundations, sometimes without being prompted. The reservations clustered around three scientific uncertainties: reversibility, heritability and complexity. On reversibility, researchers acknowledged that while a limited number of studies have shown epigenetic edits can be reversed or remain stable, it is currently impossible to predict whether an edit at a particular genomic location will persist or vanish, and for how long. This creates an awkward paradox, because the stability needed for durable medical treatments and agricultural applications is exactly what undermines the promised safety net of reversibility. As one respondent explained, scientists do not really know what makes some epigenetic modifications stick around for years while others disappear within days, and following patients long enough to find out would require decades-long cohort studies.

Heritability raised equally thorny questions. For epigenetic editing to work in medicine or agriculture, edits must survive cell division, a property called mitotic heritability, and respondents disagreed about whether they reliably do. The possibility of intergenerational and transgenerational inheritance troubled some biomedical researchers, who worried about unintended effects on the offspring of treated patients, while some plant scientists actually counted on epigenetic edits fading out over generations, reasoning that edited crops escaping into the wild would lose their modifications naturally. The third concern, complexity, struck at the heart of the technology’s predictability. Gene expression is governed by intertwined networks in which cause and effect are not linear; altering an epigenetic mark at one location can trigger cascades of unforeseen changes across hundreds of other genes, especially when the three-dimensional folding of DNA and crosstalk between cells enter the picture. One respondent noted that outside of genomic imprinting, they could not think of a single epigenetic network that is well enough characterized to guarantee a clear therapeutic output.

Despite these doubts, three distinct visions of the technology’s medical future emerged among respondents. The prevailing outlook was hopeful but modest: epigenetic editing could eventually treat cancers driven by epigenetic changes, boost the effectiveness of CAR-T immunotherapies, and address rare diseases caused by epimutations, with early clinical trials restricted to patients who have exhausted all other options. Some argued that medicine routinely advances without fully understanding a drug’s mechanism, so demanding perfection before testing would mean never developing the therapy at all. At the cautious extreme, a minority, particularly basic researchers outside translational work, warned that epigenetic editing could prove less safe than gene editing, since introducing epimutations might reactivate dormant transposons or derail cellular identity in ways scientists can no longer control once edited cells are inside the body. At the opposite pole, a small group envisioned a medical revolution in which epigenetic editors retune multiple genes simultaneously, potentially transforming treatment of autoimmune disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and even aging, with speculative applications ranging from skin-rejuvenating creams to cures for HIV and chronic hepatitis B.

The agricultural picture diverged sharply. Plant scientists interviewed for the study did not consider epigenetic editing a commercially viable breeding technology, largely because seed companies require traits that remain stable across generations and environmental conditions, from the controlled greenhouse to the unpredictable open field. Backcrossing can eliminate unwanted off-target changes in plants, removing one of epigenetic editing’s main selling points. Still, respondents sketched hypothetical applications that could eventually prove transformative, such as plant varieties that switch on disease-resistance genes only when a pathogen is actually present, or epigenetic control of flowering, which could dramatically shorten breeding cycles for seed production.

The study’s timing makes its findings particularly pointed. While most respondents questioned whether the technology is ready for real-world deployment, companies are already racing ahead: OMEGA Therapeutics completed a first-in-human clinical trial using epigenetic editing to suppress the oncogene c-MYC in twenty-four participants before filing for bankruptcy in early 2025, and Tune Therapeutics is currently recruiting patients for a trial of an epigenetic silencing therapy for chronic hepatitis B. The authors highlight a mismatch between the private sector’s focus on common, profitable conditions such as high cholesterol and obesity, exemplified by celebrated preclinical results showing durable cholesterol reduction in mice and primates, and the academic community’s caution. They argue that the dominant safety narrative is performing rhetorical work, positioning epigenetic editing as publicly acceptable in ways that may prove premature, and warn of a hype-disappointment cycle reminiscent of the gene therapy backlash of the 1990s. The researchers call for explicit reflexivity within the field, public engagement and citizen participation in shaping the technology’s future, and urge scientists to clearly articulate what evidence is truly needed before epigenetic applications move toward the clinic, arguing that making these visions explicit allows scientists, policymakers and the public to reflect on, adapt and co-create the trajectory of this emerging technology rather than simply inherit whatever future the loudest promises deliver.

Subject of Research: Scientific visions, expectations and reservations regarding epigenetic editing and its responsible innovation

Article Title: Visions, expectations, and reservations in epigenetic editing: towards responsible innovation

Article References: van Baalen, S., Verra, T., Macnaghten, P., Bunnik, E., & Habets, M. G. (2026). Visions, expectations, and reservations in epigenetic editing: towards responsible innovation. Epigenetics Communications, 6(1), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43682-026-00047-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s43682-026-00047-5

Keywords: epigenetic editing, epigenome, CRISPR-dCas9, gene expression, responsible innovation, gene editing, biotechnology, clinical trials, plant breeding, science and technology studies, research ethics, public acceptance