Team:UCL/Humans/Soci/6

Scientific uncertainty is considered an inherent characteristic in the governance of synthetic biology. According to risk society theorists, this uncertainty also has to do with a setting in which the standards of typical modern institutions such as conventional science and politics fail to accommodate to the concerns relating to rationality and security. They have been treated by the public as suspects causing the risk instead of being considered the trustees who are usually expected to manage them. A decline in the confidence in these institutions and others is what led to a form of modernization that is reflexive in nature, meaning that new arrangements have prompted new institutional reforms for environmental and social objectives. Nevertheless, technological transformations contributed to this evolution, helping to reconfigure the institutional makeup of scientific, political and economic practice (Mol and Jänicke 2009; Beck 2009: 54).

The ‘erosion of trust’ toward science and technology has manifested itself through the disintegration of this fixed and self-perpetuating institutional set-up. As a result, producing and making use of the acquired knowledge, as well as the expert authority that came with it, had to be shared now with opposing expert voices. A new heterogeneity started to emerge in scientific knowledge production where public trust in the authority of expert knowledge was no longer unconditional (Barry 2007: 246-247). Moreover, when it comes to the environmental risks of genetic engineering, experts are increasingly confronted with the difficulty and uneasiness of communicating the constraints of scientific practice and the limits of knowledge when attempting to address and mitigate the controversy. Social convention dictates that their expertise would be required to address factual matters which are sometimes impossible to answer from the available scientific evidence. Nevertheless, the concerns and questions conveyed by the lay public remain legitimate political questions. Consequently, the ‘transscientific’ questions, as van den Daele (1999) characterizes them, help to demarcate between acquired knowledge and what lies beyond (van den Daele 1999: 69-70).

In the case of synthetic biology as a discipline, environmental movements can come forward easily to counter the discourse of technological optimism and expert authority that the community of synthetic biologists might have. The reason for this is that an apparent kinship exists with a similar controversy surrounding genetic modification (GM). Despite that is sometimes described as ‘extreme genetic engineering’, ‘genetic engineering on steroids’ (Friends of the Earth et al. 2012: 2; Voosen 2013), or captioned with the notion of ‘creating’ or ‘tinkering with’ life (Kera 2014: 28; Torgersen and Hampel 2012: 143), synthetic biology however has not yet been the subject of widespread public debate similar to the heavily deprecated GM crops antecedent. This is because the existence of synthetic biology is still largely considered to be uncommon knowledge among the wider public. Yet, based on the current environmentalist attitude towards GM crops, future efforts of synthetic biology may become prone to similar displays of distrust (Pauwels 2013; Torgersen and Hampel 2012).

Regaining Trust in the Post-Traditional Society

Interdisciplinarity