Abstract
Synthetic biology raises profound questions about humans’ abilities to control their own environment and about the boundaries between living and non-living that can or cannot be crossed. Fundamental ethical, social, and political issues have to be addressed. Who should be contributing to the discussions that address those issues? How can we make sure that policy decisions incorporate concerns of various stakeholders? In this chapter I discuss these and other questions by combining methods of historical, linguistic and sociological research. I describe forms, themes, and stakeholders that contribute to the discussions of synthetic biology in the 20th–21st centuries. I argue that the evaluation of synthetic biology and similar emerging technoscientific areas benefits from a discursive perspective that is coupled with critical social theory and propose a framework that facilitates such a perspective. This approach brings synthetic biology into the space of social dilemmas that need to be negotiated as opposed to the space of scientific problems that need to be solved. It places synthetic biology into a broader social and cultural context and encourages the development of evaluation and governance frameworks that go beyond dichotomies of experts and ordinary public or fears and safeguards. It also raises questions of appropriate social, communicative, and technological structures that facilitate participation and critique.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, a series of case studies developed by the ETC group: http://www.etcgroup.org/tags/synbio-case-studies. Accessed 10 Oct 2014.
- 2.
See, for example, a press release by the J. Craig Venter Institute in 2008, http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/. Accessed 21 Apr 2015.
- 3.
See chapter by Carlos G. Acevedo-Rocha in this volume for a more detailed account of synthetic biology and its varieties.
- 4.
The Roman Catholic Church, for example, publishes its own guidance on bioethical questions on its website, see, for example, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20081208_dignitas-personae_en.html. A project on synthetic biology and religion led by G. Bennett (https://labs.fhcrc.org/cbf/Project_Areas/religion/SynBioReligion/Index.html) aims to map how U.S. religious organizations view developments in synthetic biology, but it has not published any results yet. Both accessed 21 Apr 2015.
- 5.
PATH—our approach, http://www.path.org/about/index.php. Accessed 21 Apr 2015.
- 6.
See https://www.bio.org/articles/current-uses-synthetic-biology for examples of products of synthetic biology. Accessed 21 Apr 2015.
- 7.
Here I define the scientist as a professional doing research in natural and applied sciences to allow other scholarly voices to be identified separately.
- 8.
See, for example, the polls of the Synthetic Biology project: from 2008 http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/finalhart_final_re8706b.pdf, 2009 http://www.synbioproject.org/library/publications/archive/6410/ and 2010 http://www.synbioproject.org/library/publications/archive/6655/. All accessed 06 Jun 2015.
- 9.
http://www.synbiosafe.eu/, Accessed 06 Jun 2015.
- 10.
http://www.synberc.org/, Accessed 06 Jun 2015.
- 11.
http://www.synbioproject.org/ Accessed 06 Jun 2015.
- 12.
http://www.etcgroup.org/content/mission-etc.-group Accessed 06 Jun 2015.
- 13.
The dominance of the technological and engineering approaches to life in synthetic biology has been characteristic of the 20th and early 21st century discussions. If other approaches, such as systems biology or computational approaches further develop their methods and practical applications, perceptions on life can become more complex and diverse.
- 14.
See, for example, the project Biocurious (http://biocurious.org/)—an attempt to create a community biology lab for amateurs and promote open and affordable innovations in biotechnology. Accessed 06 Jun 2015.
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Kouper, I. (2016). A Critical Participatory Approach to the Evaluation of Synthetic Biology. In: Hagen, K., Engelhard, M., Toepfer, G. (eds) Ambivalences of Creating Life. Ethics of Science and Technology Assessment, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21088-9_11
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