A Critical Participatory Approach to the Evaluation of Synthetic Biology

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.