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.