Manasa Gopakumar

This paper articulates and defends a precautionary norm for scientific gatekeeping in potentially harmful research, using a case study of Spectrum 10K, a proposed genomic study of autism that was ultimately abandoned following strong backlash from the autistic community due to concerns about the study’s possible eugenic implications, among other issues. Gatekeeping is generally understood as a practice carried out by the scientific community to uphold its epistemic standards, often through peer review and editorial decisions in publishing. However, gatekeeping might sometimes also involve public stakeholders and include decisions about pursuing certain research, not just those related to publication. Moreover, in potentially harmful research, gatekeeping might serve other goals, such as harm prevention, in addition to upholding scientific standards. I argue that effective gatekeeping in these areas involves more than just quality control: it requires carefully balancing various epistemic and non-epistemic goals, a challenge that current gatekeeping practices and regulatory mechanisms often fail to address successfully. I therefore propose the “Epistemic Precautionary Principle” (EPP), a normative and procedural principle that guides epistemically and socially responsible gatekeeping in these areas. The EPP states that such research should be pursued only if it is well-motivated and conducted with a level of epistemic precaution proportionate to the severity of the potential societal harm. I argue that Spectrum 10K did not satisfy these conditions, so the decision to abandon the project was justified. I further argue that the involvement of the autistic community in this instance of gatekeeping was both justified and appropriate.