my introduction to Sheila Jasanoff

I first came to know of Sheila Jasanoff in July at the National Academies' symposium on opportunities and challenges in synthetic biology. She eloquently opened the meeting by encouraging participants to consider whether the emerging field of synthetic biology might present an opportunity for a kind of second enlightenment that allowed us to "put science back into society in meaningful ways." Who gets to imagine the scientific future? Who will give meaning to this future, and how? Who will be responsible for it? Thus Jasanoff began to "problematize" conventional wisdom about how biotechnology does and ought to advance.

Last night I read the first chapter of Dr. Jasanoff's latest book, "Designs on Nature." The book is a comparative analysis of how three political cultures (Germany, U.S., and U.K.) are trying to steer biotechnological development toward improving the human condition. It was an exhilarating read. It acquainted me with the constructivist approach to scientific meaning, the concept of "social kinds," and the notion that natural and social meaning is "coproduced." It affirmed many of the concepts and precepts I have learned from the Rabinow lab (no offense intended, Paul - just my personal measure of healthy skepticism). I can't wait to read the rest of Jasanoff's book.

As someone who usually "sides" with the natural scientists, however, I find myself anxious about some of these new ideas. For example, I was a little troubled by the implications of a constructivist view of science and technology. Jasanoff asserts that we must be "skeptical of absolutist claims about objectivity and progress" because terms as seemingly antipodal as "nature" and "culture" have different meanings in different social contexts that deny them universality. I agree with that notion as it relates to creating useful science policy in one political culture versus any other. But a purely constructivist view seems to overly discount the universal properties of scientific and technological knowledge. After all, science and technology does, in fact, demonstrate a converging, deterministic tendency (or else China would still be trying to independently develop PCR, right?). At its logical extension, the constructivist view seems to suggest that the empirical results of a biology experiment in Hong Kong are not the same as they would be in Canada or any other political culture. That's hard for scientists at the lab bench to swallow.

It was also deeply discouraging to hear such a clear and reasoned voice implying what to me sounded creepily like, 'Because of their realist tendencies, the biotechnologists working to expand our knowledge of and control over the natural world are especially unqualified to assess the meaning and significance of their own work.' There, too, a big tension between "natural" and "human" scientists. Or perhaps I am reading the constructivist approach too literally?

If from venue to venue we could find the happy middle ground where humanist constructivism and scientific determinism can not just tolerate but function thoughtfully with one another, then we may do a better job of meeting Jasanoff's challenge of putting science into the public in deeper, more meaningful ways than ever before.

Finally, though the actors and venues change slightly, it seems to me that the word "problematize" is nearly interchangeable with the word "politicize" in our context. (To problematize is to have experts make judgments about techno-scientific progress in more or less public venues, whereas to politicize is to do the same in a very public, democratic, and non-expert way.) Again, as one who tends to identify with the biotechnology community, I wonder what kind of burden "problematizing" daily research activities represents not just to the researchers themselves, but also to the publics that rely on continued discoveries for an improved quality of life. To put a cost around problematization is not to say it isn't worth it, but rather to encourage us to think about how to engineer problematization into emerging fields like synthetic biology in order to reduce the time and effort needed to vigilantly examine and re-examine how we are or are not contributing to "the good life." (For example, I have suggested to some within SynBERC that we build into our internal proposal process some means for operationalizing core values such as safety and security by requiring applicants to include meaningful activities that promote such values. The idea hasn't exactly caught fire, yet.)

I am motivated by practical concerns that move research forward in the right direction. As I'm feeling my way through some of these concepts, which are new to me, I invite comments from those who have thought through these issues more carefully.

Public acceptance of the dangers of synbio

Here's a song called Ambien that my band and I wrote. It's about the untoward effects of the green economy on one auto worker. In the story, he spirals out of control, finding himself no longer in demand and with little to cling to in life except his 2003 Ford Expedition. We wrote the song a couple of years ago, and with the subsequent collapse of GM and others, the song has gained an eery prophetic quality.

There are clearly interested parties such as UAW, the Big Three car makers (what are they called now?) and of course Big Oil that probably wish America had never started 'going green', preferring the status quo in service of their short-term interests of job security, bigger market share, continued record profits from oil (that's happening anyway), and the rest. The question for these interested parties, and I guess the question I would pose of the poor disgruntled auto worker in my song, is, isn't it worth it to undergo changes in how we work and do business if it makes the world a better place? If people such as autoworkers were ready and equipped by their government to embrace new challenges and increasingly changing technology, couldn't my protagonist have avoided a drug-induced final confrontation in the GM parking lot?

More and more, I am thinking along similar lines with regard to synthetic biology. Are citizens willing and able to accept the cost of doing business in the post-genomic world? Will we risk biological accident, our privacy, and our very notion of what it means to be human, in order to explore how these life-changing technologies can benefit us? I am optimistic that people (especially younger generations) will tolerate a greater level of uncertainty about life and subject their assumptions to the possibility of change through scientific discovery. I believe that, if given fair and honest warnings about the good and bad to come, we will accept progress and be able to direct it toward the greatest possible benefit to humankind. Then again, I am not a romantic or religious person, so my optimism may be biased.

observations from the National Academies meeting on synbio

I attended a recent Washington, D.C. meeting on Opportunities and Challenges in the Emerging Field of Synthetic Biology, co-hosted by the National Academies, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Royal Society. The meeting brought together an international cast of scientists, policymakers, and social scientists to discuss the technical and social barriers to achieving the promise of this emerging field. Presentations, audio and transcripts from the meeting are available on the National Academies website. SynBERC investigators Drew Endy and Paul Rabinow were featured speakers, and here are two representative quotes from them:

"The question of what constitutes a good life today, and the contribution of the bio-sciences to that form of life, must be vigilantly posed and re-posed." – Paul Rabinow

"Today, each biotechnology project requires a Hercules." – Drew Endy

Here are four of several recurring themes I observed during the conference:

1. Funding agencies and universities tend to reward application-based projects over engineering projects. This leads to novel systems, but it provides little incentive for researchers to develop the engineering infrastructure needed to make biology easier to engineer for future generations.

2. Today’s intellectual property environment threatens to stifle creativity and retard economic gains. New practices and models for protecting IP while allowing others to build on it are necessary for synthetic biology to achieve the ambitious promise envisioned its practitioners.

3. The synbio community needs to come together to solve the technical problems of standardization. It is a huge task.

4. The synbio community has done a good job of trying to engage citizens about the challenges and opportunities of the field, but it can and must do better. Citizens don’t need to have a PhD to make intelligent judgments about science. New, more democratic forms of communication can help us overcome traditional boundaries to citizen participation in science and technology policy.

The definition of synthetic biology

"The definition of synthetic biology depends on whether you're trying to make money right now or not." - An unknown synthetic biologist interviewed by Mark Bünger, Director of Research, Lux Research

How to operationalize

If I could amend my last comments from yesterday's session, my departing wish would be that the silent war between "social" and "natural" scientists would end. Then, finally, the north would talk to the south, the east to the west, and all points in between would be chattering.

Observing an inquiry and capacity-building session

I feel fortunate to participate in (or at least observe) a full-day meeting among several thinkers in the area of inquiry and capacity building into the biosciences. My first observation is that there are no biologists here. This is a disappointment to me, as I believe that the second-order observations that these human scientists are making about the physical scientists need to be heard, and then understood, by the physical scientists themselves. But as the meeting progresses, I'm increasingly convinced that a card-carrying biologist wouldn't enjoy being here. A theme that came up more than once is that a biologist is trained to reduce complexity. Especially with synthetic biology, they are trained to "blackbox" complexity. This is directly at odds with ethical inquiry, which multiplies complexity. Furthermore, social scientists tend not to provide physical scientists with either the form for their ethical self-reflection (a problem of askesis) or a kind of reciprocal benefit in exchange for the increased complexity.

I identify a little more with the bioscientists than the social scientists, but I do wish there were scientists that were interested enough in critical ethical inquiry into their work to be here. I think they weren't invited because the social scientists knew they wouldn't have come. On the other hand, there's only one of CP Snow's cultures in this room.

What is reflexivity?

I was just noticing that a lot of posts in Ars Synthetica are tagged with 'reflexivity' (everything from pictures of the Vatican to comments on a sci-fi-ish ear-in-arm). But I don't really know what reflexivity means in human science terms. Anyone care to offer a down-to-earth explanation? Tom Schilling got me halfway there with this explanation. Then I read the wikipedia entry, which kind of went in a different direction.

Synthetic biology: Is ethics a showstopper? an interview with Arthur Caplan

This talk from Arthur Caplan is from the Wilson Center's Synthetic Biology Project:

"Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, explores unresolved synthetic biology ethical questions at a January 8 program with Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies Chief Science Advisor Andrew Maynard... Caplan is the author or editor of 25 books and over 500 articles in professional medical, science and bioethics journals. He has served on a number of national and international committees including as chair of the National Cancer Institute Biobanking Ethics Group, and chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning."

Caplan argues that, unlike many other emerging technologies, synbio doesn't suffer from a severe "ethics lag" as in other fields (e.g., genomics). (The first paper published on synbio ethics, Caplan's, was ten years ago.) However, the public myth of ethics lag persists and causes concern. 'Science leaps where ethics creeps is incorrect,' he states.

Caplan doesn't feel there's anything unique about synbio from an ethical standpoint (yes, perhaps we need to develop new IP and patent policies, but ethics doesn't have much to contribute to that).

To paraphrase: "Battle for egalitarian access to new technologies is often used as a rhetorical ploy against the development of that technology."

What is unique about synbio: it challenges people's metaphysical beliefs about what is life (the reductionistic approach to life and the "playing God" question).

biosafety, biosecurity, and organizational forms

I'm reading Carlo Caduff's contribution to Biosecurity Interventions (eds. Lakoff and Collier). I note Caduff's distinction between biosafety and biosecurity. One way he characterizes the difference between the two: with biosafety, you add layers of safety (enclose the virus in a cell culture, enclose the cell culture in a safety cabinet, enclose the cabinet in a safety lab), whereas with biosecurity you subtract layers of information to make things more secure from purposeful maluse (remove the methods section from the paper, remove the sequence from databases).

I am reminded of a conversation that took place within SynBERC some time ago about biosecurity. I believe Tom Knight made the analogy between biology and computer science, and how computer science learned that sunlight was the best disinfectant. Only by making potential threats completely public could the community effectively respond to them. This sounded good at the time, but I'm not sure if I agree now. Computer viruses are created and infect computers all the time, and the CS community reacts quickly but ad hoc to these attacks. Information is sometimes lost, but vital systems and the broader community remains largely uneffected. If you extend the CS analogy to the living world, it would be unacceptable for a small number of people to get sick or die from a virus, even if the overall response were quite excellent. It seems that computer science has a lower threshold for what we would call good security.

How does SynBERC map onto this? Reading this collection confirms what I already thought: that SynBERC cannot effectively address issues of human health security independently. I think our place in the safety/security landscape is to continue to innovate approaches to safe biology at the lab level. Making biology easier to engineer entails blackboxing the details, which in turn might cause synthetic biologists to inadvertently create dangerous entities. But if we can blackbox safety measures into our biological components, we can address both biosafety (inadvertent creation of biohazards) and biosecurity (intentional use of biology for harm). "Safer" chasses is a good example.

great passage from Oliver Morton's new photosynthesis book

"When our knowledge of life's most fundamental processes allows us to begin redesigning and embellishing them rather than just studying them, a whole range of new chemical technologies will become possible." Treehugger.com book review

random neologism: molecular gardening

definition: A form of do-it-yourself (DIY) biology done as a pastime for personal, non-commercial applications. One might keep a molecular garden (e.g., a Petri dish) next to houseplant on the windowsill to provide power to small personal electronics, cultivate glowing bacteria as a zero-carbon nightlight, or as a creative biodesign piece.