 So, I'd like to take this moment to just kind of switch gears. We've had this wonderful discussion, and now we're beginning the plenary session portion of our evening's entertainment, and I would like to ask each of the panelists, and maybe each person can speak on this, what are the big, what lies ahead in the future? What are the big questions, the problems, the possibilities, and what kinds of that you see on the horizon for reproductive technologies, and for yourself having participated in this conference, what are the things that you envision yourself carrying forward into the future in your work? So, just a couple minutes for each person, and Keras, why don't we start with you? Sorry, can you say it again, a couple of things that we're going to carry forward in our own work? So, just future possibilities and problems that you envision are going to happen, and how do you think that you will be carrying these conversations forward in your own work? I think that the many of the things that have, a lot of things have come up, and they'll continue. I'm not sure that how quickly genome editing of humans is going to make it to the clinic, and I'm not sure whether the majority of jurisdictions will go for somatic rather than germline, as you've heard me say. I don't have a, in principle, much rather take it case by case and have an in principle objection to either, though I understand why people do. I think that we are very quickly going to be in a space where we don't, we're not sure what our relation to one another and to the machines we live with is. I think we're becoming in many ways that are really wonderful as well as really troubling, deeply hybridized with our smart homes, and our various kinds of augmentative and assistive devices, and our, actually, extraordinarily poorly designed in the sense that it's so easy to lose prostheses that we carry around with us. And I think that as the agencies shift, it's still possible to recuperate narratives of autonomy and self-agency in relation to our machines more or less, although we have a lot of areas around social media use and things where we have actually, often to the detriment of our youth, kind of lost that integrity of the self and opened up to trolling and all kinds of awful things in ways where the model of the individual doesn't hold very well, but I think it's coming very soon that there's going to be a really radical redistribution of agency and what that means for reproduction and everything that's structured and given meaning to life to date, even while there's all kinds of augmentative things I would love to, just love to have, that are not to do with abilities, they're to do with just knowing stuff, because I'm a nerd. Things I've learned from this is I just, I learned a lot from every single talk, content details and perspectives on the world. It's been really, really great. Thank you. Thank you, Alison. Yeah, I've learned quite a lot from these last couple of days, too. We've talked a lot about social injustice, about discrimination, about gender problems, problems of the world, both historical and now, but actually I'm a clinician working now with individuals who have a problem and I think we have to separate those two things. I don't actually think that anything that I'm doing in the clinic is going to solve the problems of the world and the social injustices. I think there are different issues. I think they need different solutions. But equally, I don't think that anything that can be contributed by the discussions and social science is going to help me with a couple in front of me that wants a baby. I can help them from a psychological point of view, cope with the problem that they have within the society that they live and the problems that their infertility is causing them, but actually it is, they are two separate issues. We also need, you asked specifically about where it's going in the future, what's going to happen. And I hope that you've got the message that actually things develop very slowly and that new things take a long, long time to get to the point at which they're going to be clinical treatments. So in the IVF field, the things that will improve are little technical things that make growing numbers in the laboratory better. It's never going to be 100%. But there are little things that are getting better. We will get better at identifying which patients are going to be successful. Because we know that some people who come for IVF might only have a 1% chance of success and others might have a 50% chance. The better we can predict that, then the less likely we are to subject those with only 1% chance of success to a complicated treatment that we think is not going to work. So there will be improvements that way. And then I think the thing that's going to happen over time and what will happen in the generation of the youngsters here is that some of these things will become normal in the same way that IVF was not normal 40 years ago, but is now normal and statistically given the age and population in the room, 2% of this population, people in the room here, were conceived from IVF. So we're not talking about something that is now something desperately new and to be worried about. It is part of what we are. And I think some of the things we might be talking about now in 40 years' time will be just that's what we are and to be something new. Thank you. Oh, so much. Okay, two minutes. I know. So I want to return back to that idea of relationality that I introduced yesterday. And to say that, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking and talking and investing in how to how to help people bring babies into this world that they want. And one of the things I really am interested in putting that in conversation with is, one, how we treat those babies once they're here. So it goes back to one of the questions and thinking about putting as much energy and investment in trying to give parents the ability to to to raise those babies in environments, both physical environments and social environments in which they can thrive. I think if we sort of laser in only to the point of getting the babies here, and then we leave left uncovered the entire rest of their lives in terms of really putting thought and innovation, social innovation, to thinking about how to make sure that they grow and develop as, you know, healthy, happy people, then we're sort of imbalanced in our prerogatives. Similarly, I want to put in relation to reproducing reproductive sort of reproductive technologies is the experience that many, many women have of what Dorothy Roberts calls reproductive punishment. Everything from the extreme examples of, you know, sterilization, but also the everyday subtle experiences of having your reproductive capacity demeaned in social relations. And let me give you a very concrete example of this. I was pregnant with my first son when I was 21. And the daily experience you do this is why she's my advisor. Okay. The daily experience of, you know, that being frowned upon, right, both being a young black woman, pregnant in daily interactions, what you come to expect, you know, of people giving up their seats or holding doors open, but a kind of hostility that many women experience. And I think one of the things we can do as soon as we walk out this door, in terms of improving the reproductive capacity and well-being of all women that doesn't require shiny technology is to think about how we treat all women when we do see them when they're pregnant, right? So this is a low tech thing that we can do. The fact of the matter is, black women have their babies earlier, infant mortality is higher, maternal death is three times higher than white women. And this is not mainly or only a matter of genetic issues. This is about the social etiology. This is about the social experience. And we have studies to show that the level of stress caused by racism impacts our reproductive health. This is low tech changes that we can make outside of the lab if we say that we really care about fertility. What have I learned so much from the individuals? But I think on a more meta scale, I've really learned that it is possible to design a conversation, to put together a conversation that really allows us to talk across disciplines expertise across the lay expert divide. And it says a lot about the care and thought that went into the planning of this, that when people say it's not possible to do, we have living proof that it is possible to do it. So, well, I think I spend my life trying to make sure that both men and women can determine when they want to have children and when they don't, so that they have more control over their lives throughout their lifespan. It feels to me as if the male contraceptive field is not challenged by the same ethical questions that the female contraceptive field seems to be experiencing. And so maybe talking on that would have raised more fears and questions and criticisms than the male contraceptive field seems to raise. I think it's it's it's important. What I learned, what I learned from hearing from hearing the speakers is that that we really can't believe that sterilization might be happening in a in today's environment without permission and desire for such an operation that that's terrifying to think about. I think the part as much as I enjoyed all the presentations of the speakers, I think the thing I enjoyed most was my session yesterday with the students. I found that incredibly energizing and fun. And one of the things that I came away from that was the enthusiasm that the young women have for having partners who are practicing male contraception. I think it's going to go on everybody's Facebook page available as a method to help with their profile. So I know myself and I know that I'm an optimist. So I'm going to offer sort of an optimistic view of everything. I think we've heard a lot of really great discussion about, you know, incorporating a wide variety of viewpoints and incorporating a very broad set of ideas into the way technology might get implemented and might get practiced. And I think that that's incredibly important to put together as we as we act on that. I think that it's really critical to take those viewpoints and account. But I think it's equally critical to not get too stuck in, to basically just not get stuck, to make a decision and to make a conscious decision based on that kind of input. And to recognize that inaction can be just as much of a decision as action can. Because there are patients that may be suffering from a disease. So to say, we're not going to go forward with this is a valid choice. But that is an action and people are affected by that action. And to say, we are going to go forward with a certain technology and this is going to affect people is also a type of action. So I'm very interested in gene editing. I think it holds a lot of problems for the future. I think that we do need to of course bring not just the technology of does it work technically, but also how does it sit into this social framework in which, you know, there have been movements that have used ideas of breeding and things like that in very negative ways. But I think that we can learn from that. I think we can take those negative examples and I think we can incorporate them in positive ways to try to learn from those mistakes. And like we were talking about just a bit ago, we can change the way we do things. So if we if we try to incorporate those things, and we then enact something based on that, and it's not working, we can do something about that. We're the ones doing that action, we can stop and say, oh, we're doing this, we're not doing it right, let's change it and let's do it. So it doesn't have to be these like, you know, one movement forward, it can be this constant path as we adjust what we're doing. And I think that that is at least for me, it's an empowering way of thinking about it because it removes that paralysis of choice where I need to get everything absolutely perfect before planning the next 30 years of what we're going to do. We need to get things as good as we can get it right now and make a step and then let's figure out did we make the right step and then make the next step and continue making steps. And I think that that way, at least for me, has a lot of promise for both helping people that are suffering from diseases as well as doing it in a way that's responsible to communities around us. Great, thank you. Sorry. I have to ask you, there was a question that I think I need to ask you that came through. So one questioner would like to know how you feel being the token male. And if you could just speak briefly on that and then we can move on. So I'm in the sciences, obviously, and there's this horrible thing that's happened in the sciences where most group leaders are male. And it's especially terrible because most graduate students and postdocs are women, right? So there's this crazy gap. And so to me, this is actually great and refreshing because I'm used to sitting on these panels of old white men and everybody has exactly the same ideas and it's really boring. And this is really great. It's much more intellectually stimulating in a lot of ways. Like there's a lot more interesting ideas and it challenges me and that's the best part about this kind of discussion. We've had about 200 years of watching all male panels. So to make up for that, we need about 200 years of all female panels. Then we can start to have gender balance panel after that. So anyway, I just thought I would bring that up. Thank you very much for addressing that. And I can authenticate that. I asked you that on the first night. And you said it's great. Thank you, Marcia. OK. My take away from all this amazing conversation is many new ideas for research questions and papers and lectures and courses. So I can't wait to do those right away. I want to reflect on our experience as speakers and listeners, as experts and audience. I'm struck by now some of us have shared some personal stories in that reveal the choices that we've made in our careers and our our choices about who are the beneficiaries of our research and how we identify with whom we identify in the long list of players and how we position our standpoints. And I made a little list, which I'm going to go through quickly because I can't resist the parents, the mom and the dad or the two moms, etc. The childless or infertile couples, the child who might suffer, the future progeny, those with or without access, groups marginalized and targeted with selection or deselection, the donors, the surrogates, the egg and the sperm, the clones and the robots. And I apologize for anybody I've left out. So we we make these choices of our standpoints and they're very complex and very personal. So my challenge as a as a teacher and as a researcher and an advocate is to listen and to try to expand my sense. I'll I'll share that the American Sign Language for them and for us. And I would like us to all reflect on how to expand our sense of us in our work. Thank you. We have time for a couple of more, a couple of questions from our audience. And one one question is what kinds of so sometimes we what we find is more important than what we're looking for. What have been the significant surprises in your research? I think sometimes people have this idea that, like, you know, science is here's a problem. Here's a solution. I mean, head to the solution that found the solution. And here it is. And Jacob, I loved how you were talking about like it's actually a much more convoluted journey. So what have been the surprises? I can start. You want to? Well, the tip. Can you start? I think it comes down to the process of science that you were talking about is that, you know, we don't get eureka moments. They are very, very, very few and far between even when it came to talking about the significance of stem cells. That was a year or two that there was a sort of it. I said, yeah, the light bulb went on, but it went on very slowly. It wasn't a sort of a moment when you suddenly wake up in the bath thinking, I've got it. It's much more complicated than that. I don't think there's been anything that has totally surprised me, because if you're a good scientist and you're thinking ahead, you're working out what the problems are going to be before you ever get there. So surprise is perhaps the wrong word. Please, that it's worked out. Yeah? OK. So for my first major project as a PhD student working under CARIS, I was doing this work on stem cell research. And I went in thinking I was going to try to understand the class dimensions, the racial dimensions, the gender dimensions, because that trifecta, race class gender, is a thing in the social sciences that's available as a lens to understand social processes. And the thing that I was most struck by was, in fact, really thinking about the disability justice dimensions of regenerative medicine. It had not been on my radar at all, but as soon as I was in the field talking to people, listening to their ideas, and sort of immersing myself, it was this other axis of difference that was so relevant, but was not on my radar at all. It didn't go in thinking it was. And it's also the thing that I learned the most about. And so that to me makes it significant is that I didn't already have all this background and understanding. And so it stays with me as the most valuable thing that I learned from it, because it was completely new, but so relevant. And so that's why I'm a big fan girl of Marsha and all the work of disability justice advocates, because that was more my learning curve really took form. Great. Any other surprises anyone would like to share? I think one of the things that continues to surprise me is that things are really, really much worse than you think, and people are really, really much better than you think. Yes. Full stop. Yes. Yes. Actually, but I could just add on to that, that when things are really bad, the ways turning to certain fields of scholarship, turning whether it's to scientific information in the area, whether it's to reproductive justice, social studies of science, indigenous studies, African-American studies, disability justice scholars and their activism, so often is so nurturing, so enriching, and so I almost want to say, salivational. It can take me from a place where I don't know what we're doing to a place where, get it, I see you. I see you. This is going to be okay. We can do this. Great. So maybe I'll share like a science geek moment just because I don't know, I like geeking out. So I told people that the way Junimenting works, the way Cas9 works, it's this evolved enzyme that it's meant to work in bacteria for something else entirely. One surprising thing about my career that we showed in my lab and a bunch of other labs have shown in different ways and very surprising ways is that the enzyme itself does not work the way it should in bacteria and it's still completely a mystery why it works this certain way and that may be actually why it's so good at doing genome editing. So it's this thing that if you had to design something from an evolutionary point of view, it would not work this way. And it turns out it does instead work this way. No one has any idea why it works that way and the fact that it works that way might maybe why it's so good at genome editing and some of the other tools that are out there are not as good. And so this is one of those things where we go out, we make new discoveries about the world and now we're left wondering why and that's sort of the continual process of science is you make one discovery and you say why and then you get the answer to that and you're like well that's weird, why is that? And then you keep asking why down the road. And so I think that in the process of writing grants you always have to come up with oh here are my anticipated outcomes and all this sort of stuff and that makes things a little boring when you write the grant but the thing that I always hope for is that moment when you get the results and you're like I have no idea what the heck happened. I don't know what this means at all. No, those are fun puzzles. All right, so I have one thing that surprised me that not, there are many things that surprised me but one that I mentioned to someone earlier today and they liked it. That sperm biology is different than somatic cells than the rest of the cells in the body and it uses different biochemistry, it uses a different signaling mechanism inside that is much more similar to a bacteria. So I always say that sperm are just evolved bacteria. That's great. I wanna say thank you to all of you up here. I said at the beginning of this whole conference that we were gonna be zooming in and out a lot and we've been given so many valuable tools to think about, to reflect on, to share with others. Ruha and Marcia, you did a wonderful job bringing multiple lenses for us to kind of like think about this topic from a social justice and disabilities perspective and so we really, really appreciate that. Diana and Allison, you both, I don't know how you did it but you got into both the science of your respective fields as well as the regulatory aspects and walked us through like how much work has to be done in order to get things from the lab to the bedside table, I think Diana said. And Jacob, I know that you answered a lot of people's questions about like what is CRISPR? What can it actually do? And I think it's so important to really get an actual CRISPR scientist perspective on like what's the hype, what's possible and to bring that back down to something that's a little bit more realistic so that we can actually understand what it is that we're dealing with. And Keras, thank you so much for tying together all of the threads of these incredibly complicated topics related to reproductive technologies and the things that we didn't even get a chance to bring in, you did such a wonderful job of touching on areas that I encourage all of you to think about really. And there's so much more to explore on this topic that even in two days with such wonderful speakers just scratch the surface. So thank you very much for all of that. And thanks to all of you for the questions that you've raised. I wish, Lisa and I both wish that we could have answered all of them because there were many fascinating ones and it breaks our hearts to not be able to keep everyone chained here for days and days answering them. We have appreciated them and please don't feel if we didn't ask your question that we were not wanting to ask them for any reason. It's just there's only so much time. I have a question. Can we get the complete list of questions? I think so. That would be really great. I think the courtesy of paper and voice hive that we will figure out a way to make that happen. That'd be great. Thank you. That's a great suggestion, thank you. Do we have a couple of minutes or do we need to release everyone now? Now that you've asked it this way, I think we have a couple of minutes. Not to put you on the spot, Lisa. Are you someone who's okay with a talk? It's party o'clock people. Really quickly, there was one question about, so how do you think we could keep this type of conversation, right? This really interdisciplinary conversation going forward. What are the other possible venues or I don't know, how do you feel that you can keep this conversation going together or individually or structurally? I have a question to like, so when I listen to some of the things you presented and I feel this outrage and I wanna do something to make it better, but I don't have any tools in my basket to do that. How do we, what do we do? Do you have any advice? I do, I have lots of advice. How long do you have? Just apparently only two minutes. So my view is that we all have a zone of influence. People who we talk to, we learn from, and I think everyone from someone who is, their main person they're influencing is a toddler on the playground to someone who's giving keynotes. I don't think one is greater than the other. I think we need to identify what our zone of influence are and the things that we think are important in terms of advancing society forward. We need to use some of that time and energy in our zone to try to deliberately work to develop conversations around that. Now how does that happen? I think one of the things, tangible things we can do and what I've done before with other kinds of related issues. So all of this that we're doing is being recorded, right? And so one of the things to think about is inviting people over to your house, showing a session, a recording, having a discussion. Perhaps we develop, like once comes out of this, is actually a reading list, a reading and media list of resources that people can use. Maybe you have a book club. Maybe you take some of the things we've been citing. Perhaps you email us and say, hey, I'm doing this book club discussion with people at my public library. Would you Skype in for a Q and A? We're so connected, we need to develop those connections in order to elevate the conversations that we're all having. So just thinking about how to tap into that. I mean, I have participated in that squarely in the realm of thinking about racial literacy, right? At my public library last year, I wasn't teaching, I was on sabbatical and I worked with an organization. They did most of the legwork, but we had a six-part series, weekly series in the public library. We didn't know how many people were gonna show up. Princeton is a pretty elitist, white town. We're like, who's gonna come out to talk about racial literacy? Six weeks in a row, 200 people showed up every single time from the high schoolers to the 95-year-old who had walked down the street with Einstein was there, right? And so people are hungry, not just for facts and information, which are the fingertips, but knowledge, but also conversations that are meaningful, right? And so part of what we can all do is think about how to stage and cultivate conversations where you don't need an expert in the room to have the conversation. You can read about what the expert has to say, so-called expert. You can see the videos, but then you have expertise and knowledge and experiences that are relevant. So having those conversations, that's the starting point. It's not gonna solve the world's problems, right? But part of what we have to do is start to elevate the conversation and the consciousness and we do that in our own spheres of influence. And so thinking about what you can do, right? At your senior citizen's home, at your library, all of the context of community that we can start to use those spaces a little more deliberately. Thank you. Thank you. In my cases, as I mentioned during my talk, I'm very involved with this group, Science Fair, at the moment, and we've argued for something, so in the Human Genome Project, there was a small proportion of the budget was put for work in what was called ELSI, ethical, legal, and social implications. I don't really like the language of implications because it suggests that none of those issues arise until all the science is done and it couldn't be less true for everything to do with genomics. But the point of putting aside some proportion or internalizing or making it part of the money you get with a grant, that you specifically seek to collect data and address issues that are to do with social problems and social issues is the thing that I'm working the hardest on at the moment. So we do need to be tracking racism, sexism, ableism in many spheres of life at the moment, and I'm particularly interested in getting proper databases and internalizing it to funding initiatives so that that evidence is a really first rate. I probably concur with that about grants and every time you get an award or anything to do or you ask for permission, there is the box about patient public involvement and putting it in context. I think there is a difference between considering the reproduced technologies that we're trying to do and the sounds that we're trying to do and being aware of the social context in which we are doing it and taking the social problems and saying we are going to change them by the application of reproductive technology. And I think that's a bit of a balance here that maybe we're looking at a little bit too strongly because I don't think reproductive technologies are going to change the inequities of the issues that you were discussing. Access to treatment might, but the actual technology is not. There is an injustice due to the fact that some people can get that technology and other people won't get that technology. But in the context of engagement, being aware of what we're trying to do in the context of society is very important but being very clear about what it is we are trying to do and limiting it to those benefits. I'm big on listening, listening skills. I teach them in the first class in every course to get the students to talk to each other and to listen to each other. And a lot of what we're talking about at this conference is about sex in all the ways and the varieties of doing it and not doing it in alternatives. But I'm a faculty advisor to issues of sexual assault on my campus. And I'm amazed when I hear the stories of young women and men, what about sex is not being talked about? It's still a very awkward topic. And I think that's one of the biggest barriers to challenging all the issues around sexual assault. And I think that's true here. The issues of disability and race, for example, are silenced. We're embarrassed, we feel awkward, we don't wanna look stupid, and we don't have a way to go there unless we get awkward, get embarrassed, make mistakes, be willing to talk and listen in the areas that are really uncomfortable. Thank you so much. Not to end on an uncomfortable note, but I think I must acknowledge that we are actually at the end of our time here. Thank you so much again to everyone in this room and everyone beaming in from the internet for watching us for the next, for the last couple of days. We hope you'll join us for the banquet. That promises to be a really great time as well. Jad Abumrad from the Radio Lab podcast will be here talking about the liberal arts and the podcast episodes that they've done on the topic of reproductive technology, so please join us for that. Thank you so much, yeah. And thank you so. And I'll just add my thanks to all of you for being here and hope to see you next year. Yes, for soil.