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SB4.0 - a social scientist's perspective

Jane Calvert reports on what stood out for her at the gathering in Hong Kong

For a social scientist, Synthetic Biology 4.0 was a very interesting experience. It included sessions on issues such as global social impact, biosecurity, future scenarios, intellectual property and commercialization. Also, in his closing comments to the conference, Drew Endy acknowledged that “we have new colleagues from social sciences, civil society organisations and industry”.

There seemed to be a real attempt here to bring this diverse range of actors into the synthetic biology community. Here I will pick up on a few of the issues that particularly struck me in the various talks and sessions.

10th October -- OPENING DAY

Many talks in the opening day stressed the importance of building a community.

Drew Endy in the opening session talked about the central importance of building a community of people in synthetic biology. He linked this to issues to do with access to BioBricks, legal frameworks and open technical standards.

Pam Silver said that the meeting was for the community. She talked about how students are the future of the field, and stressed the importance of the iGEM competition.

Ron Weiss also emphasised the role of iGEM. He said that we do not yet know what synthetic biology is, but the process of educating new members of the community through iGEM was a process of learning about synthetic biology. He pointed to the exponential growth of the field in terms of iGEM teams and publications. He said that the way of moving synthetic biology forward was to move iGEM forward. He linked this to the iGEM philosophy of ‘get and give’, i.e. contributing back to the registry of parts.

11th October -- GLOBAL SOCIAL IMPACT

The fact that a session organised by the ETC group and involving speakers from civil society organisations was being held at SB 4.0 is itself worthy of note.

Pat Mooney from the ETC group started this session by saying that many practitioners of synthetic biology responded quite constructively to the open letter from social movements and other civil society organizations to the Synthetic Biology 2.0 conference. He said his aim was to create an environment in which everyone might talk, rather than seeing the engagement between scientists and NGOs as a series of battles.

Jim Thomas (ETC group) said he wanted to raise questions about power, control and social justice, rather than about safety and security. He said that synthetic biologists should follow Ghandi’s talisman: “how will the most dispossessed benefit from this?” He pointed out that synthetic biology community likes to see itself as young, open and ethical – as epitomised by the iGEM competition – but that he is more concerned with the large number of companies already involved in synthetic biology, which he said demonstrated that the field is not driven solely by a group of well-meaning individuals. The main focus of his talk was on biofuels.

Camila Moreno (Terra de Delitos) also talked about the problems with biofuels in Brazil, ending with the point that “differently from BioBricks, real life is really complex and interconnected”.

In the discussion that followed, Pat Mooney argued that synthetic biology should not be pursued in a commercial environment, although he agreed that it could be undertaken to further understanding of biology. He asked: what is the next step in a conversation like this? He said he didn’t think that it was helpful to divide into ‘proponents’ and ‘critics’ of the technology. Instead he emphasised the need for some kind of a dialogue.

One participant in the discussion asked those who were present in the audience (approximately 50 people) to raise their hands if they were working in synthetic biology. Surprisingly, only about 3 people raised their hands.

12th October -- LEGAL SCHEMES AND RIGHTS

In this session Hillary Creely talked about her work on attempting to establish a legal framework for BioBricks. She put forward several different options, showing that improvements to the Registry could either go into the public domain, become trade secrets or be patented. She said that community norms are needed in addition to legal frameworks, and that it may be necessary to have incentives, both social and economic, to force people to go along the public domain route.

Janet Hope in her talk on open source approaches pointed out that an open source license is not just a legal contract, but also an expression of a social contract and governance structure. She said that it should be acknowledged that promoting open source involves engaging in a form of social engineering.

She talked about issues of cooperation and trust, and how it is necessary to build either a community of norms or a market which does not sanction certain behaviours. She linked this issue to self-regulation in biosecurity.

She said that in open source it was necessary to have compulsion for adoption and compliance, which was hard to institutionalise. But she also pointed out that open source approaches can serve other purposes, for example, they can give reputational capital to those who engage in the scheme. This connects to some comments that Drew Endy made in an earlier commercialisation discussion session where he stressed the importance of building a community that innovates openly.

TOWARDS A CONSENSUS PAPER

The EU project on the safety and ethical aspects of synthetic biology (SYNBIOSAFE) presented a ‘Priority paper’ on the societal aspects of synthetic biology (online at http://www.synbiosafe.eu/uploads///pdf/priority_paper_SB4.pdf). They took comments and questions from the audience. Their priority paper fell under the three headings of bioethics, biosecurity and biosafety.

One of the interesting discussions in this session was whether the phrase “synthetic biology” could be substituted with “genetic engineering” without any change to the wording of the priority paper. This raised the question of which issues were specific to synthetic biology.

The Synbiosafe project plans to make a short film to promote public awareness of synthetic biology. They will also hold a meeting on 15 November 2008 in Vienna to discuss their results.