The technical architecture of blockchain is what makes these ethical questions so consequential. A distributed ledger is, at its core, a database replicated across many computers, where new entries can only be appended, never erased, and where consensus mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake determine which version of the ledger is authoritative. Immutability, the property that records cannot be altered once written, is often celebrated as an ethical advantage: it resists tampering and single points of failure. Yet the review shows that this same immutability collides directly with data protection regimes such as the General Data Protection Regulation, which grants individuals a right to erasure. Scholars have examined the tension between permanent records and data minimization, consent, and accountability in decentralized systems, often framing ethics through a compliance-oriented lens rather than a broader inquiry into user autonomy or power asymmetry.

The review’s methodology is worth understanding, because it is what gives the findings their weight. The researchers followed the PRISMA 2020 framework, which provides structured guidance for reporting systematic reviews in a transparent and reproducible manner. After removing duplicates, 727 unique records remained and were subjected to title and abstract screening. This stage retained 411 articles for full-text assessment, and a detailed review of those articles, applying predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, excluded 320 studies in total. The largest single reason for exclusion was that 207 articles addressed blockchain from a purely technical or economic perspective without substantive ethical analysis. The final dataset of 91 peer-reviewed articles formed the empirical foundation for a qualitative synthesis and thematic analysis that distinguished between ethical values, design or governance principles, and concrete mechanisms and instruments.

What emerged from this analysis is a picture of ethical discourse that is heavily concentrated on a narrow cluster of technical and regulatory concerns. Privacy, security, transparency, and decentralization dominate across application domains. Security and trust were similarly prominent themes in the early literature, which positioned cryptographic assurance and distributed consensus as ethical advantages over centralized systems. Subsequent studies, however, have highlighted new vulnerabilities introduced by smart contracts, governance attacks, and the concentration of power among miners or validators, complicating simplistic narratives of trustlessness. Transparency and auditability are frequently cited as ethical benefits, particularly in supply chain management and public-sector recordkeeping, yet critical scholarship notes that transparency is often unevenly distributed, privileging technically sophisticated actors while offering limited intelligibility or recourse to affected communities. Transparency alone, the review concludes, does not guarantee accountability or democratic oversight.

The temporal distribution of publications tells its own story. Scholarly attention to blockchain ethics was limited prior to 2018, reflecting the technology’s early association with narrowly defined financial and cryptographic applications. From 2018 to 2019 onwards, the volume of ethics-focused publications increased steadily, coinciding with the expansion of blockchain into socially sensitive domains such as healthcare, digital identity, and public-sector governance. The period between 2020 and 2024 marks a pronounced growth in ethical scholarship, a surge associated not only with broader technological diffusion but also with global socio-political developments that heightened concerns around digital trust, surveillance, and data governance. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified debates around the ethical implications of digital infrastructures used for contact tracing, identity verification, and service delivery, prompting renewed scrutiny of blockchain-based solutions and their societal consequences.

Geographically, the review exposes a striking imbalance. Approximately 80 percent of the reviewed studies originate from the Global North, led primarily by the United States at 22 percent and the United Kingdom at 21 percent, with additional representation from Western European countries such as the Netherlands at 13 percent and Germany at 11 percent. Contributions from Global South regions, including Africa, parts of Asia, and the Middle East, remain comparatively limited. This uneven representation matters because dominant ethical concerns in the literature are shaped largely by developed-world research contexts, where issues related to privacy, surveillance, and data governance feature prominently. The authors argue that ethical frameworks developed within dominant Western liberal traditions are often transferred into new settings without sufficient adaptation to local histories, relational norms, or governance realities. In postcolonial and culturally diverse environments, uncritical transfer of universalized ethical assumptions risks reproducing exclusion, misalignment, or governance failure.

By application domain, the reviewed articles cluster around healthcare at 25 percent, public governance at 17 percent, financial services at 15 percent, and digital identity initiatives at 7 percent. Each domain frames ethics differently. In financial services, ethical discussion is dominated by security, fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and market integrity. In healthcare, concerns centre on privacy, consent, and data protection, reflecting the sensitivity of personal health information. Supply chain applications emphasize transparency, traceability, and accountability, particularly in relation to provenance verification. Public-sector applications broaden to include legitimacy, accountability, and citizen trust, but these studies remain fewer in number and vary considerably in analytical depth. Across domains, ethical insights are rarely transferred or adapted from one context to another, a siloed treatment that limits cumulative learning and contributes to inconsistent ethical standards across blockchain deployments.

The methodological findings are perhaps the most sobering. The majority of the 91 studies rely primarily on conceptual, normative, or theoretical analysis, drawing on ethical principles, legal reasoning, or philosophical argumentation to assess potential risks and benefits, often without reference to empirical observations of deployed systems. Empirical studies addressing ethical issues in blockchain applications are comparatively limited, and where empirical work is present, it most commonly takes the form of technical case studies, architectural analyses, or simulations focused on system performance, security, or efficiency. Studies employing qualitative methods such as interviews, ethnographic observation, or participatory design approaches remain rare. Quantitative empirical investigations of ethical outcomes, including user impact, governance effectiveness, or distributive effects, are also scarce. As a result, there is limited evidence assessing whether blockchain systems achieve stated ethical objectives in practice, and ethical discourse often remains anticipatory or speculative rather than evaluative of real-world implementations.

Formal ethical and design frameworks fare little better. Value Sensitive Design, which emphasizes the systematic incorporation of human values into technological design, has been applied sporadically to blockchain systems, often in exploratory or illustrative ways rather than as a comprehensive design methodology. Responsible Innovation, which emphasizes anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness as guiding dimensions for ethical innovation, is rarely applied systematically, and when it is mentioned, it tends to remain at a normative or policy-discursive level. In a substantial portion of the literature, ethical evaluation is conducted without reference to any formal framework at all, relying instead on ad hoc principles, regulatory benchmarks, or domain-specific norms. Where design-oriented approaches are employed, ethical considerations are often embedded indirectly through architectural choices such as permissioned versus permissionless ledgers, access control mechanisms, or privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques, but these decisions are rarely linked explicitly to underlying ethical values or subjected to systematic evaluation.

In response to these patterns, the authors propose a values-driven ethical framework with a layered structure that distinguishes between ethical values, design and governance principles, and mechanisms and institutional arrangements. The framework identifies privacy, security, transparency, and decentralization alongside underrepresented values such as fairness, inclusivity, participatory governance, communal accountability, and environmental responsibility. It does not treat these values as static or universally weighted, instead recognizing that ethical priorities may vary depending on application context, institutional setting, and stakeholder composition. Design principles such as proportionality, explainability, accountability, participation, adaptability, and sustainability function as intermediaries between abstract values and concrete mechanisms. Crucially, the framework treats code-based mechanisms and institutional processes as complementary rather than substitutive: while blockchain architectures can encode certain constraints and affordances, ethical governance requires ongoing institutional engagement, deliberation, and adaptation. The authors recommend embedding ethical impact assessments, participatory oversight, accountability and redress mechanisms, and context-sensitive implementation requirements into blockchain policy, procurement, and deployment processes. The framework is not empirically validated in this study, and the authors are explicit that it should be interpreted as a conceptual and integrative contribution, a scaffold for ethical deliberation and governance planning rather than a prescriptive or one-size-fits-all solution. But as blockchain systems continue to be deployed in domains with significant societal implications, from digital identity to healthcare records to smart-city infrastructure, the review makes clear that ethical governance will remain a critical challenge, and that the field’s persistent principle-practice gap, where ethical commitments are articulated but seldom translated into design requirements, governance mechanisms, or accountability structures, demands more than rhetoric to close.

Subject of Research: Computer Ethics

Article Title: A systematic literature review of ethical concerns in blockchain technology: towards a values-driven framework

Article References: Motea, M., & Oba, P. (2026). A systematic literature review of ethical concerns in blockchain technology: towards a values-driven framework. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 362. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01642-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01642-y

Keywords: blockchain, ethics, systematic literature review, value sensitive design, responsible innovation, digital governance, privacy, sustainability, systematic, literature, review, ethical

The stakes could hardly be higher. Advanced materials, including nanomaterials, are now recognised as strategic enablers of Europe’s green and digital transitions, underpinning sectors from energy and construction to mobility, electronics and health. Recent policy initiatives, shaped in part by the influential Draghi Report on European competitiveness, have elevated advanced materials to a question of technological sovereignty and sustainable innovation. The European Commission’s Strategy on Advanced Materials for Leadership lays out fourteen actions, ranging from boosting research and innovation to accelerating the leap from laboratory to industrial scale, increasing investment, and establishing new governance structures such as the Technology Council for Advanced Materials. That council’s subgroup on uptake and deployment has explicitly called for supporting education and skills for advanced materials and for ensuring that standards and regulations allow new materials to enter the marketplace efficiently. In other words, the political machinery is turning; what is missing, the researchers contend, is the human infrastructure to make SSbD real.

SSbD itself is technically demanding in ways that traditional training rarely accommodates. The framework’s guidelines, prepared by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, make clear that implementation requires integrating knowledge from scientific, technical, social and policy domains simultaneously. A competent practitioner must span material design, risk assessment, life-cycle thinking, sustainability assessment, ethics, governance and stakeholder engagement. Assessing human health impacts alone demands familiarity with the prioritised map of OECD Test Guidelines developed under the Malta Initiative. And despite the European Union’s long-standing commitment to responsible innovation, the current SSbD community remains dominated by nanosafety and sustainability experts, with ethicists and social scientists playing a markedly smaller role. Recent work has begun to expand social and economic sustainability assessments within the framework, but the authors stress that Social Science and Humanities theories and case studies must move from the margins of SSbD training to its core if the framework is to be applied credibly across its full breadth.

The evidence for a skills gap is not merely anecdotal. A survey of 172 members of the international nanotechnology community found that future training programmes should move beyond technical risk and sustainability assessment to cover socio-economic evaluation, implementation challenges, stakeholder engagement and decision-making under uncertainty. Emerging studies on SSbD capacity-building echo this, calling for a common educational foundation that pairs technical competencies with social, ethical and communication skills. Some initiatives have already begun responding: the Network for Safety and Sustainability of Chemicals and Materials has led competence mapping efforts; the Joint Research Centre and the Horizon Europe Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals run annual SSbD Boot Camps; and newer ventures such as the European Advanced Materials Academy and Sweden’s Mistra SafeChem research programme are promoting modular training, lifelong learning and interdisciplinary collaboration. But the authors find that these efforts remain fragmented, often limited in duration, geographic reach and disciplinary scope, with little attention paid to governance structures or mechanisms that could sustain capacity-building beyond the lifespan of individual projects.

To ground their argument in practical reality, the researchers went beyond the literature and gathered perspectives directly from the community. At the SSbD2024 conference, the EthicsbyDesign2024 online conference and the STS Conference Graz 2025, they ran an interactive poster session, a moderated online question-and-answer session and World Café discussions involving participants from academia, industry, consulting and policy. Participation was voluntary and contributions were collected anonymously, with no personal or identifiable information recorded, and the authors are careful to note that these were exploratory activities, illustrative rather than statistically representative of the wider SSbD community. Still, the thematic patterns that emerged were strikingly consistent with the published evidence. Stakeholders repeatedly emphasised interdisciplinary competencies combining risk assessment, sustainability assessment, systems thinking, communication and stakeholder engagement.

Ethics and the social sciences surfaced again and again in these discussions. Participants highlighted Responsible Research and Innovation, science communication, international collaboration and societal impact considerations as essential components of any serious training programme. One particularly forward-looking element of the researchers’ competency synthesis draws on the Inner Development Goals framework, a set of skills and qualities intended to underpin a sustainable global society, including critical thinking. The synthesis also flags emerging concerns such as the ethics of artificial intelligence and data in materials innovation, and the ethics of international collaboration, where openness, security and equity must be balanced. On the technical side, the required toolkit includes risk assessment with uncertainty handling and probabilistic approaches, life-cycle assessment integration, data management skills for coping with data gaps and quality issues across life-cycle stages, multi-criteria decision analysis, and material design for sustainability that accounts for recyclability, reduced complexity and reduced hazardous substances.

Perhaps the most persistent refrain from stakeholders was the need for deeper industry engagement. Participants stressed that SSbD training must reflect sector-specific implementation challenges, aligned with the European Commission’s defined priority areas of energy, construction, mobility and electronics, recently expanded to include health. The authors concede that their own engagement activities suffered from limited industrial participation, which they take as evidence of the problem rather than a dismissal of it: further outreach to industrial associations, small and medium-sized enterprises, start-ups, consultants and sector-specific experts is essential to tailor future training to real-world needs. Without manufacturers and developers at the table, SSbD education risks producing assessments that look rigorous on paper but cannot be translated into innovation and industrial decision-making, a translation barrier that recent literature identifies as a persistent obstacle alongside data availability, interdisciplinary integration and the lack of harmonised terminology.

The researchers’ answer is a conceptual training ecosystem, deliberately framed as a discussion structure rather than a prescriptive model, that connects competency development with system enablers and implementation outcomes. Priority actions include strengthening collaboration among existing European initiatives, developing modular and multilingual curricula, expanding lifelong learning opportunities and broadening participation from industrial and societal stakeholders. Crucially, the proposed partnership would build on what already exists rather than duplicating it. The PLANETS project’s SSbD Workbook and the PARC SSbD Toolbox are cited as valuable foundations that could be woven into future curricula, accelerating programme development by leveraging community-driven tools and shared vocabulary. Harmonised terminology is identified as a prerequisite for effective communication, training and implementation across disciplines and sectors, addressing one of the most stubborn friction points in a field where chemists, toxicologists, engineers, ethicists and regulators must all speak the same language about the same material.

The ultimate ambition extends beyond Europe’s borders. The authors argue that capacity-building should be treated as a strategic enabling condition for the long-term operationalisation of SSbD, and they suggest the Pan-European partnership could evolve into a broader international network, potentially building on the International Network Initiative on Safe and Sustainable Nanotechnologies, which already promotes collaboration and knowledge exchange within the SSbD community. By connecting education, training, reskilling and upskilling with wider European objectives on sustainability, industrial competitiveness and innovation, such a partnership would reduce fragmentation and accelerate the growth of a skilled workforce capable of implementing SSbD principles across sectors and value chains. The vision, funded in part by a long list of EU Horizon projects including Nano-Commons, Risk-Gone, MACRAMÉ, PLANETS and IRISS, is of a self-sustaining training infrastructure that outlives any single grant.

What makes this Perspective compelling is its candour about the limits of goodwill. Europe has the policy frameworks, the assessment tools and increasingly the methodology to make materials safe and sustainable by design, but good intentions collapse without people equipped to execute them. The paper’s authors, drawn from institutions including Empa, RIVM, the University of Nottingham, the Nanotechnology Industries Association and Paris Lodron University Salzburg, represent precisely the cross-sector mix they advocate. Their message to policymakers, universities and industry alike is that training the SSbD workforce is not an accessory to the advanced materials agenda but its foundation, and that the window to build a coordinated, modular, multilingual and sector-sensitive training ecosystem is open now, before fragmented efforts harden into permanent gaps between what Europe promises and what its materials innovators can deliver.

Subject of Research: Capacity-building and training needs for Safe and Sustainable-by-Design nano- and advanced materials in Europe

Article Title: Capacity-building for a Pan-European training partnership for safe and sustainable-by-design nano- and advanced materials: stakeholder-informed perspectives and future directions

Article References: Ortiz-Galvez, L. M., Malsch, I., Resch, S., Falk, A., Briffa, S. M., Salcines, C., Exner, T., Kelly, S., Marcoulaki, E., Soeteman-Hernandez, L. G., & Himly, M. (2026). Capacity-building for a Pan-European training partnership for safe and sustainable-by-design nano- and advanced materials: stakeholder-informed perspectives and future directions. Frontiers in Nanotechnology, 8, Article 1913843. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnano.2026.1913843

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnano.2026.1913843

Keywords: advanced materials, nanomaterials, Safe and Sustainable-by-Design, SSbD, workforce training, capacity-building, sustainability, risk assessment, European Union policy, responsible innovation, life-cycle assessment, interdisciplinary education

The analytical engine behind the argument is the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, developed by science and technology studies scholars Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim. These imaginaries are collectively held visions of desirable futures that a society pursues through science and technology, and they do more than reflect values; they actively shape which questions get asked and which get deferred. In East Asia, Son argues, the dominant imaginary has been one of catch-up and national ascent, a narrative in which technology functions primarily as the vehicle for escaping historical subordination and achieving prosperity. Within such an imaginary, ethical scrutiny of technology itself can appear not merely unnecessary but almost disloyal, a brake on the national project at precisely the moment acceleration matters most.

The first structural tendency Son names is importer’s pragmatism. For decades, East Asian economies consumed technologies designed, standardized, and philosophically pre-digested elsewhere. When the artifacts arrive ready-made, the ethical debates that accompanied their creation arrive, if at all, as afterthoughts or foreign imports. The philosophical labor of asking what a technology should be, rather than merely how well it works, was performed in other languages, other institutions, and other societies. Importing nations became extraordinarily skilled at adoption, refinement, and deployment, but the muscle of first-principles normative inquiry atrophied. The result is a policy culture fluent in technical specifications and market strategy but comparatively silent on the deeper questions of what these systems do to human relationships, labor, and dignity.

The second tendency, pursuer’s competitiveness, compounds the first. Nations that perceive themselves as chasing the technological frontier organize their entire innovation ecosystems around speed. Son points to South Korea’s recent drive to be among the world’s top three AI powers, including the selection of elite teams to build a sovereign AI model, as a contemporary expression of this logic. In a race, the metric is velocity, and ethical deliberation is structurally coded as friction. Frameworks such as the country’s new comprehensive AI law, enacted as the first of its kind, attempt to attach safety and trust requirements to development, but Son’s analysis suggests that legislation alone cannot counteract an imaginary in which national prestige is staked on being first. The competition of speed, he argues, must become a competition of direction.

The third tendency is the collectivist narrative of progress. Where technological advancement is framed as a collective national achievement, individual harms can be reframed as acceptable sacrifices on the road to shared glory. Son traces this pattern through a sobering catalogue of Korean disasters: the Seongsu Bridge collapse, the Sampoong Department Store collapse, and the Wenzhou train collision, alongside the Hwang Woo-suk stem cell fraud scandal. Each episode, in his reading, illustrates how the imperative of progress can suppress dissenting voices, marginalize whistleblowers, and delay accountability until catastrophe forces reckoning. Applied to AI, the same collectivist logic surfaces in policies like the rapid rollout of AI textbooks in schools, where documented confusion among students and teachers and concerns over digital overuse were subordinated to the national narrative of educational transformation.

The fourth tendency is perhaps the most culturally distinctive: the limited centrality of what Son calls the Frankenstein complex. In Western societies, Mary Shelley’s creature and its descendants have seeded a deep cultural anxiety about creations that turn on their creators, an anxiety that fuels public resistance, precautionary regulation, and a rich literary and philosophical tradition of technological self-doubt. Thinkers from Jacques Ellul to Hans Jonas built ethics on this wariness. East Asian societies, by contrast, have largely absorbed technology without an equivalent mythic register of rebellion and retribution. The absence of this cultural brake has eased acceptance and accelerated diffusion, but it has also removed a natural trigger for public deliberation. When nothing in the collective imagination insists that new powers demand new humility, normative debate must be built deliberately rather than inherited.

Son’s case study of Korean AI adoption shows how these four tendencies converge in the present. The country has positioned itself as an attractive test bed for global AI companies, a role that brings investment and visibility but also imports the industry’s well-documented externalities, from the exploitation of low-paid data workers abroad to embedded gender bias in generative systems. Domestic civil society groups, such as the Institute for Digital Rights, have produced reports on AI’s human rights implications, yet the policy mainstream remains oriented toward development targets. Even labor conflict carries the pattern: when Hyundai’s union battled the rollout of Atlas robots, the dispute was framed primarily as an industrial relations problem rather than an occasion for society-wide reflection on automation’s direction. The structural tendencies do not prevent ethical debate, but they consistently narrow its scope and blunt its force.

The paper’s constructive proposal is deliberately not a call for culturally distinctive principles. Son explicitly declines to argue that Confucian benevolence or Buddhist non-attachment should be grafted onto AI governance as a regional signature. Such an approach, he suggests, misidentifies the problem as one of content when it is actually one of structure. Instead, he outlines a fourfold redirection of East Asian techno-modernity: from passive importer to responsible developer, meaning that nations must now own the full normative consequences of the systems they build and deploy; from competition of speed to competition of direction, rewarding societies that choose better trajectories rather than merely faster ones; from national collectivism to expanded responsibility, extending the circle of moral concern beyond the nation to workers, users, and communities elsewhere who bear the costs of AI supply chains; and from faith in progress to strategies of survival and human flourishing, a shift in the underlying imaginary itself.

The implications reach well beyond Korea. As AI development globalizes, the assumption that ethical frameworks can simply be exported from the societies that built the technology is increasingly untenable, and the temptation to answer with a menu of regional principles grows. Son’s analysis offers a sharper diagnostic: the question is not which tradition supplies the right maxims, but which structures allow any maxims to matter. A society whose imaginaries celebrate acceleration, whose institutions reward catching up, and whose culture lacks inherited scripts of technological suspicion will neutralize even the most elegant ethical principles. Conversely, restructuring those imaginaries, through democratized technology governance of the kind theorists like Langdon Winner and Andrew Feenberg have long advocated, could make deliberation constitutive rather than ornamental.

What makes the argument resonate now is the timing. East Asia is no longer merely importing AI; Korea has enacted the world’s first comprehensive AI safety law, launched national committees to claim a place among the top three AI powers, and embedded AI into classrooms. The region has crossed the threshold from pursuer to potential leader, and with that transition comes the loss of the importer’s alibi. If Son is right, the next chapter of East Asian AI will be judged not by how faithfully it applies ancient wisdom to modern machines, but by whether societies forged in the crucible of catch-up development can invent a new imaginary, one in which asking where technology should go is as prestigious as asking how fast it can get there.

Subject of Research: Structural analysis of East Asian AI ethics and techno-modernity using South Korea as a case study

Article Title: Do we need an East Asian AI ethics?: South Korea as a paradigmatic case

Article References: Son, W.-C. (2026). Do we need an East Asian AI ethics?: South Korea as a paradigmatic case. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03336-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03336-8

Keywords: AI ethics, East Asia, South Korea, techno-modernity, sociotechnical imaginaries, Confucianism, Frankenstein complex, AI governance, AI policy, philosophy of technology, national competitiveness, responsible innovation

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