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Goodbye Azodye UCL iGEM 2014

Sociological Imaginations - Reconciling Environmental Discourses
Overview

In this section we will look at our project and synthetic biology from a very different perspective. As students of the emerging field of synthetic biology we feel very much drawn towards the science and technology that makes our project possible. However, as scientists in the making we are part of a society which means that this project also provides us with the opportunity to reflect on how our work affects and is affected by the social and ecological environment in which we work. We therefore have to imagine how our current and future societies would go about dealing with the implications of synthetic biology. This kind of reflection has been termed by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills as sociological imagination in order to describe our awareness of how individual experience and the wider society relate to one another (Mills 1959).


Here we will use our sociological imagination to look at how our project can help to conceive a sustainable governance model for synthetic biology. The Goodbye AzoDye Project is instrumental in achieving this because it enables us to explore and examine the dual nature of the technology as synthetic biology promises to be highly beneficial to society while at the same time creating increasing uncertainty in terms of incalculable risks and issues of biosecurity. There are signs that the community of synthetic biologists is prone to be confronted with a potential public controversy revolving around the environmental hazards that their dual-use technology can be perceived to bring to society. At the same time, however, by taking part in the Environment Track of the Giant Jamboree, UCL iGEM 2014 is also engaged with the idea of solving an ecological problem. Hence, a paradox emerges within the team in which discourses of environmental decline - in relation to the misuse of synthetic biology and the problem of azo dye effluents - are forced to coexist with discourses of environmental innovation to solve these problems.


Considering the complex and novel nature of scientific practices in synthetic biology there is a need to look at adapted forms of governance that deal with processes of innovation in a reflexive manner. This is seen as necessary in order to devise policies that can accommodate a sustainable development of the emerging technology within society. Considering the environmental risks to which they are ascribed, policy frameworks ought to engender effective governance that seeks to foster good science, not to hamper it. It also recognises that good science goes hand in hand with open, clear, transparent regulation to ensure both trust and accountability. Another prominent feature of synthetic biology is its ‘cross-borderness’, in addition to the embedded scientific uncertainty. It simultaneously crosses the borders of scientific disciplines, industrial sectors, and geopolitical areas. Considering the transboundary and uncertain nature of this emerging technology it might be interesting to look at how policies are being developed within the framework of transnational governance. Some views support the idea that synthetic biology policies should not only be regulated from a top down perspective through governments, but that non-governmental stakeholders and organisations should be able to engage in self-regulation. The transboundary – and transnational nature of synthetic biology practices makes it pertinent to examine biosecurity and sustainable innovation discourses at the level of transnational governance structures such as iGEM. The latter holds a series of promising characteristics with regard to innovative regulatory frameworks.


Key words: dual-use governance - environmental discourse - ecological modernisation - risk society - UCL iGEM 2014 - sustainability - uncertainty - reflexive modernisation


Introduction

Facing Duality in Synthetic Biology


Biology is said to bring the greatest innovation in the twenty-first century. With the promise of synthetic biology to design and build biological systems, this innovation appears to not only change science and technology, but even have considerable transformational potential for societies that continue to seek progress. A high-level expert group on new and emerging science and technology within the European Commission specified a total of six domains where biotechnology as a discipline could be strongly affected due to the emergence of synthetic biology: "biomedicine, synthesis of biopharmaceuticals, sustainable chemical industry, environment and energy, and the production of smart materials and biomaterials and counter-bioterrorism measures" (Calvert 2010; European Commission and Directorate General for Research 2005: 13-17; Kelle 2013, 2012). And as these processes of innovation expand, synthetic biology becomes functional in creating highly beneficial applications to society. However, as with many emerging technologies, synthetic biology has the potential to cognate with issues of misuse and risk. Considering that in synthetic biology principles of engineering are brought to biology, safety and security thus come to the fore as relevant topics in designing an appropriate governance structure for emerging technologies (Kelle 2012).


Resulting from this duality between beneficial innovation and harmful outcome surrounding synthetic biology, is therefore a socially constructed dilemma that such a dual-use technology seems to imply (Tucker 2011). This dilemma thus pertains to practices and discourses conveying this dual nature through portrayals that can be both negative and positive depending on the social dispositions held by members of society. Moreover, the dual-use nature of synthetic biology becomes even more salient in instances when its use is set against an environmental backdrop where the technology is perceived as a strategic tool in bioremediation efforts and the development of biofuels, while the inherent characteristics of synthetic biology can cause major concern in terms of the ecological calamities it can induce. Hence, there is a discursive discrepancy that can become rather acute when its technological implications are concerned in relation to the environment (Dryzek 2005, Purnick and Weiss 2009).


It is therefore interesting to take a closer look at how diverging narratives on technology and environment can occur within one iGEM team working on an environmental solution. As part of the competition's Environment Track, the Goodbye AzoDye Project of UCL iGEM 2014 can from that perspective be instrumental in getting a better understanding of the dynamic tension between tackling the problem of textile dyeing process wastewater disposal, and the potential ecological hazards from the technology they are using to solve this problem. However, unlike genetic engineering and the production of genetically modified crops, synthetic biology has not yet been challenged by a widespread public controversy surrounding its scientific practices, mostly due to the general unfamiliarity of the discipline among the wider lay public. As a result, the iGEM competition provides an experimental opportunity to see how opposing discourses develop both internally and externally as teams look at various aspects related to their summer project (Pauwels 2013; Torgersen and Hampel 2012; Tucker 2011).

Anticipatory Socialisation for Sustainable Governance in iGEM


Considering that the iGEM competition urges students of synthetic biology to be comprehensive in the way they deal with in their own technology and their project as a whole, the assumption can be made that the competition and the iGEM framework in general, fosters a context of social learning for students. This implies that the competition can be seen as a form of education for responsible innovation that, in turn, demonstrates some of the qualities that are required to make the governance of synthetic biology viable in terms of managing sustainable innovation. The way the competition is organised shows that within a team and within the context of the competition, spaces are created for the students to think about what they are doing, how it affects society and how they can respond to issues of safety and security while being part of society. Moreover, the competitive elements of iGEM gives students the necessary incentive to practice synthetic biology as a profession to which they can aspire to. The anticipation of fulfilling this objective, as portrayed by the iGEM, shapes the student's expectations of what it means to be a synthetic biologist (Pauwels 2011; Zhang 2013).


Therefore, the competition not only prompts students to reflect on their own scientific efforts and how science is practiced in general, the projects also encourages efforts that can benefit appropriate policy-making and governance for emerging dual-use technologies. In the case of UCL iGEM 2014, the governance implications also pertain to sustainability in response to environmental decline that has already occurred. Coming up with a solution that can subvert ecological controversy also requires an understanding of environmental governance in addition to dealing with the nature of emerging technologies. As such, the Goodbye AzoDye Project can thus act as a clear example of how a politics of environmental knowledge can be highly ambiguous in its discursive practice when confronted with the uncertainty that dual-use technologies bring (Kelle 2013; Lentzos 2012; National Research Council (U.S.) et al. 2009).


Methodology

In order to gain a better understanding of the challenges related to the sustainable governance of an emerging technology, and synthetic biology in particular, the study in Sociological Imaginations has focussed extensively on the case study method. The singular nature of this method allows the researcher to isolate a specific instance within its wider context in order to explain how social relationships are interwoven in a specific case. Here we have chosen to take a look at our own team, UCL iGEM 2014, so that we are able to see how this team’s work and environmental discourse is related to broader societal developments. In other words, why does the team choose to do the project that they have chosen to do in the light of the characteristics of the times we currently live in? The topic that is developed here involves the ways in which our environments are under the influence of scientific human practice and technological innovations. These are issues that necessitate questions of sustainability as the environmental implications and discourses surrounding the production and application of knowledge imply that there are positive and negative effects of the latter when it comes to the state of the environment. A case study about sustainability research entails therefore a search for models and practices that appear to pave the way to achieve sustainable outcomes. Furthermore, it also means that the researcher has to be engaged with a topic that requires interdisciplinary interaction and processing data that are potentially unfamiliar to the eye of the social scientist. Nevertheless, sustainability research is ultimately about how the social factor interrelates or manifests itself in relation to other spheres, where a variety of disciplines can have differing perspectives on how a solution might be devised. When making an attempt to explore why iGEM and this team can provide an insight in understanding, and thus enhancing sustainable practice and outcomes, it is key to consider the complex (social) world as something that is unmistakeably beyond our control. Regardless whether the use of multiple variables can keep track of intricate changes, these complexities cannot be definitively reduced to the models of social phenomena we seek to create in the meantime (Evans 2011).


In social scientific research, the case study method is often not made explicit when researchers explore its methodological need because a predetermined case implies that the scope of the research is already a given. However, the motivation to answer a carefully constructed question on a sustainability issue, is juxtaposed with the kind of empirical work of a case study that would suffice to answer that question. Its rigour, scientific validity and appropriate use are therefore especially important when it comes to sustainability research considering that the multiple potentialities of actions, influences and outcomes require the simplicity and particularity of a case to demonstrate the scientific validity of the case in question (Evans 2011). A case study delineates the parameters of the subject in which the researcher is interested but does not disclose how it should be executed. To examine and analyse the UCL iGEM team of students or scientists in the making, it is important to actually look at what they do and say as practitioners of sustainability. Therefore, conducting an ethnographic study of this team can uncover some indications ‘about the ways sustainabilities are created, practiced and held to be true. Or they can tell us how the ‘ideal’ versions of sustainable living fail to take hold in the communities to which they affect’ (Enticott 2011: 39).


The ethnographic method in this case study primarily consists of conducting participant observation as a team of UCL iGEM 2014, in which I, the author of Sociological Imaginations takes part in the case study itself while still maintaining a semi-outsider position. The idea of combining ethnography and participant observation came in first instance from an e-mail conversation with previous contestant Sara Aguiton, from the iGEM Paris 2009 team, who demonstrated the use of this method in the iGEM competition of that year. While she primarily applied it to ethical issues, I have attempted to focus on how to use it for sustainability research (Aguiton 2009). Being a participant of the team entails various channels of observation. The team convenes on an almost daily basis during the summer of 2014, usually in the Biosciences Common Room of UCL, initially handling specific issues of the project on specific days of the week. During the month of June, I attended meetings about two times a week to discuss Human Practice topics as they were the most relevant to my work. When I eventually noticed that the level of saturation was reached in the covered topics and themes, I started focussing more on online presence, primarily to the general public. Media such as Facebook – both internal communication and public communication, Twitter, e-mails and plenty of material on the team’s collective Google Drive folder. In addition to the offline and online ethnographic material, I conducted an extensive focus group with ten members of the team with the support of Alberto.


The qualitative data collected from these previous methods subsequently needs to be subjected to a method of analysis. This research will draw on Maarten Hajer’s (2000) conception of discourse analysis to answer the stated research questions through the lens of an environmental controversy. The issue of how synthetic biology is constructed and understood in relation to solving an environmental problem, in this case the leaching of azo dyes into the environment, has to be discussed by considering the contexts, social practices and contents attributed to the discourse. As a consequence, it will constitute a "specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorisations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities" (Hajer 2000: 44). Coherence is here not necessarily seen as a prerequisite to a discourse considering that the complexity and uncertainty of environmental problems usually engender a multitude of possible statements coming from different pockets of knowledge. For instance, synthetic biology for the prevention of azo dye pollution, consists of not only of the dual discourses of innovation versus security, but also of questions regarding its economic and ecological implications, its (bio)ethics, and the sophistication of the technical features (Hajer 2000). For this study, I will consider the UCL iGEM team as an actor that produces a particular discourse within environmental politics. Notwithstanding this specific 'mode of talking', they somehow need to learn to communicate with a wide variety of actors who force them to diversify their discursive practices in order to gain prominence within the iGEM competition. And so this implies that they have to fully engage themselves with their project on a highly 'inter-discursive' level. (Hajer 2000: 46).


Glossary
  • Anticipatory socialisation: Adopting norms, values, standards and behaviour of a group, which non-members of the group aspire to join. Through social interactions and experience, these individuals learn to take on the role they have yet to assume in order to facilitate their assimilation and eventual participation in the group (Marshall 1998).

  • Black-boxing: Ignoring or not paying attention to the internal workings of a scientific or technological achievement, or as Bruno Latour describes it, "the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become" (Latour 1999).

  • Commodification: Making a commodity out of goods, services, ideas or other entities that are usually not considered as salable things. This concept from Marxist political theory describes a process where market values are attributed to something that did not have such economic or commercial value before, and therefore sometimes replace certain social values.

  • Cross-borderness of synthetic biology:The simultaneous crossing of borders of scientific disciplines, industrial sectors and geopolitical areas. Various difficulties may arise from this as different notions of what knowledge is, come together and encounter various challenges in governance measures.

  • Deskilling synthetic biology: Making synthetic biology more accessible as practitioners do not need some of the skills in molecular biology to work on it. This has given rise to 'Do It Yourself' biology as an expression of citizen or amateur science (Calvert 2013).

  • Discourse: "A specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorisations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities" (Hajer 2000: 44)

  • Dual-use technology: Technologies which can be used for more than one goal, usually having both civilian or peaceful purpose and military aims. They imply a dilemma "because it is difficult to prevent their misuse without forgoing beneficial applications. [...] [M]any of the emerging technologies with the potential to do the most good are also capable of the greatest harm" (Tucker 2012 :1).

  • Ecological modernisation: Optimistic theory "that aims to harness the power of human ingenuity for the purposes of harmonising economic advancement with environmental improvement" (Cohen 1997:108; Huber 1985; Jänicke 1985; Simonis 1988).

  • Ethnography: The study of people's actions in everyday contexts, which means that the research takes place in the field. Data collection usually occurs unstructured through participant observation or through informal conversations. The researcher focusses on a small group of people to facalitate in-depth study. The subsequent analysis of the data "involves interpretation of meanings, functions, and consequences of human actions and institutional practices, and how these are implicated in local, and perhaps also wider, contexts. What are produced, for the most part, are verbal descriptions, explanations and theories; quantification and statistical analysis play a subordinate role at most" (Atkinson and Hammersley 2007: 3)

  • External accountability: (for synthetic biology) Accountability to the people outside the community of practising synthetic biologists, whose lives are affected by the implications of the technology. As a social actor, this community provides external accountability by acknowledging that there are concerns from others with regard to their actions within their scientific discipline. Internal accountability, on the other hand, refers to already existing chains of command within an institution (Zhang et al. 2011).

  • Governance: Refers, in its broadest sense, to the various ways and processes in which social life is coordinated. Therefore, alongside markets, networks and hierarchies, conventional governments are one of the modes in which institutions can be involved in governance, meaning that many heterogeneous actors are involved. Hence, the distinction between state and society has blurred so that new ways of governing are introduced, whether is be beyond the territoriality of the nation-state, or networks between government and other entities, or even by making adaptations to the way governments themselves work. The term governance, however, usually denotes how politics became less about governmental mechanisms of 'command and control', and more about procedures of 'consultation and deliberation', which sometimes favours an increasing presence of market mechanisms (Heywood 2002: 6).

  • Ignorance: Knowing that the knowledge is limited in a certain area. It increases with every state of new knowledge.

  • Interdisciplinarity: Combining two or more academic disciplines into one activity, which implies thinking and working across disciplinary boundaries.

  • Late modernity: The continuation of modernity as it is today, which is characterised by the way we have strongly developed into a global society. This is in contrast with the idea that we instead live in postmodern times and therefore have left modernity. Authors of the risk society theory and reflexive modernisation rather believe that modernity still aptly describes the times we currently live in, despite various technological and social changes that have emerged in late modernity.

  • Modernity and modernisation: Modernity refers to the contemporary historical period that is characterised by a rejection of tradition, the emergence of individualism, freedom and formal equality; an optimisitic belief in progress on social, scientific and technological levels; rationalisation and professionalization. The period is preceded by medieval feudalism and makes a transition to capitalism and the market economy, accompanied by industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation; the development of the nation state and its institutions.

  • Modularity in synthetic biology: The premise that, at the level of nucleic acids, proteins and biochemical pathways, biology can be understood as made out of components that can be functionally separated ans recombined as they possess their own properties regardless of the context that they are put in, much like Lego bricks. In synthetic biology, these modules are made synthetically to fit into a range of different biological circumstances. The principle of modularity helps biological parts to be predictable in their function, making them prone to blackboxing, i.e. not requiring knowledge about how a particular module or biological part has been constructed.

  • Non-knowing: A type of ignorance with "knowledge about what is not known but taking it into account for future planning" (Gross 2010: 68).

  • Open-source biology: Collaborative practices in the biological sciences where tools are made freely available to enable new discoveries to spur innovation.

  • Oversight: Control and surveillance by an external authority, usually the government, in the practices of a certain professional group in society.

  • Professionalization of synthetic biology: A governance strategy for synthetic biology where regulation is combined with the advantages of self-governance so that scientific progress can occur in agreement with public values. This would mean that the synthetic biology community would be given delimited authority over synthetic biology practices, granted by statutory legislation. Practitioners would therefore have to be licensed in order to practice it. The concept makes an attempt to overcome the seeming dichotomy between a self-governing community of synthetic biologists ('bottom-up') and external regulation imposed by government ('top-down') (Weir and Selgelid).

  • Reductionism: A philosophical position which analyses and describes a complex phenomenon as representing a simpler or more fundamental level than the intricacies of the system appear to indicate. According to this position, the complexity of a system can thus be reduced to explanations of its individual constituents.

  • Reflexive modernisation: Process of modernisation that manifest itself in the risk society whereby reform and adaptations of already existing institutions (i.e. politics, science, economy) are essential to accomplish progress. The role of science and technology here is instrumental in re-evaluating such institutions like science itself, as technology is also considered to be the cause of the new hazards in this risk society. Science and technology are thus used in a reflexive manner to manage the risks of technologies developed in the process of modernisation. The adaptations and reforms are hence found in the way science, politics and business operate, thereby generating strategic concepts such as sustainability and precaution with which they can set out a new trajectory. On a political level, this reflexivity has expressed itself through subpolitical forms of non-governmental organisation and new social and environmental movements.

  • Risk: A situation of uncertainty in which some of the possible outcomes involves an undesirable outcome. In this case, the way a system operates and behaves is well-known so that one can anticipate the outcome and quantify the distribution of risk probabilities. As a result, assessing risk can be calculated objectively and rationally under conditions of controlled uncertainty (Gross 2010: 61).

  • Risk society: A society increasingly preoccupied with the distribution of (technological) risks, and "dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself" (Beck 1992:21). These risks differ from other times because "(1) they are undetectable by direct human sensory perception; (2) they are capable of transcending generations; (3) they exceed the capacity of current mechanisms for compensating victims" (Cohen 1997: 107) a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself.

  • Self-governance and self-regulation: A people or group that is able to autonomously exercise all of the necessary functions of power without intervention from any other authority. This bottom-up approach excludes other social actors from controlling future scientific practices, which motivates the criticism that self-governance goes against democratic principles.

  • Socialisation: The process of learning throughout life in which norms, values, customs and ideologies are inherited and disseminated so that individuals acquire the necessary skills and habits to participate in society. The result is that socialisation makes sure that there is contuinity in the cultural and social configurations of a society.

  • Sociology: The study of the origins, development, structure, functioning and organisation of social relationships and institutions in society. It is a scientific attempt to understand social agency in order to make (causal) explanations about social order and the effects of and changes in social relationships using empirical research methods and critical analysis.

  • Subpolitics: Expression of political modernisation where new stakeholders emerge and take on roles of leadership to drive institutional reform. This is especially the case in environmental governance where environmental movements, non-governmental organisations, businesses, and other stakeholders are increasingly present in political decision-making of environmental policy.

  • Tacit knowledge: Knowledge that is highly implicit when transferring it from one person to another, making it more difficult to acquire this knowledge. It cannot just be learned by written or verbal communication, but often requires (intensive) practice and/or talent. In the case of synthetic biology, it usually requires years of training to use a certain skill to complete a complex task in molecular biology or biotechnology. Because of the deskilling trend, the necessary tacit knowledge is considerably reduced making it more accessible for non-experts.

  • Technologies of hubris: The over-reliance on science and technology in the innovation policy agenda where aspects of uncertainty are excluded from analysis. This concept is in contrast with technologies of humility where unforeseeable consequences and social implications are taken into account (Maynard 2008).

  • Transnationalism: The contemporary evolution of greater interconnectivity between nations of people accompanied by the receding significance of nation states on a economic and social level.

  • Uncertainty: "A situation in which, given current knowledge, there are multiple possible future outcomes" (Gross 2010: 3).

  • Upstream: "Public participation before significant research and development has taken place and before establishment of firm public attitudes or social representations about an issue" (Pidgeon and Rogers-Hayden 2007: 191)

Conceptual Framework: The Governance Challenges of Synthetic Biology

Theoretical Framework: Opposing Paradigms in the Face of Environmental Decline

Chapter 1: Synthetic Biology for Environmental Reform

Chapter 2: UCL iGEM 2014 in the Risk Society

Chapter 3: Transcending Multifaceted Borders

Chapter 4: The Playful Professional and Sustainable Governance

Conclusion

List of References


Author: Kevin Keyaert*

Overview

Table of Contents


* The author of Sociological Imaginations, which includes all material that constitutes this section of the UCL iGEM 2014 wiki, has written and created this section in continuation of a research dissertation submitted for the MSc in Environment, Science and Society at the Department of Geography, University College London. The editing of Sociological Imaginations started after the submission of the dissertation. It involves a study which required full participation in UCL iGEM 2014 by bringing forward the scientific insights from the dissertation as a contribution to the competitive objectives of the team.

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