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.