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). Besides the intrinsic scientific uncertainty, the governance challenges of synthetic biology exhibit a considerable degree of what Zhang et al. (2011) call ‘cross-borderness’. This cross-borderness as governance strategy entails not only bridging nations through transnational action, but most of all, bridging the trust gap through public engagement initiatives and bridging disciplines through interdisciplinarity. We now examine how the Goodbye AzoDye Project exhibits these cross-border properties as a way of demonstrating how the iGEM competition acts as an incentive and model for governance strategies.

Regaining Trust in the Post-Traditional Society

Despite the unfavourable conditions of uncertainty in the public sphere, the crumbling scientific tradition remains an important focal point for the expectations of the reluctant and vigilant public. Therefore, as Giddens and Pierson (1998) argue, “[t]rust offers security in the face of future contingencies” (Giddens and Pierson 1998: 109), but in a post-traditional setting, experts are given the benefit of the doubt considering that they have not ceased in their attempts to provide certainty nonetheless (Beck 1999). With regard to the use of synthetic biology, the team also confirms that there is a problem of trust. They attribute this primarily to the lack of knowledge and familiarity with how synthetic biologists operate, and that this drives a misrepresented perception of the risk involved. The challenge, then, in terms of governance measures is to embrace trust and make it ‘active’ through the merits of “equality, discursiveness, reciprocity, [and] substantiation” (Beck 1999: 116). One of the ways this can be done, in other words finding a method to recuperate trust, is through public engagement (Stebbing 2009). From that perspective, it makes sense for iGEM to bring forward an operational framework, or even a philosophy to include public engagement as an important element in the competition. In that way, students become familiarised with “navigating both inside and outside the Ivory Towers” as they become part of the synthetic biology community (Kuldell 2007: 2; McLennan 2012). The motivation or idea behind this is that when students become acquainted with what occupies the minds of the public, and learn how to effectively communicate the methods and intentions of their efforts, they will be able to provide better guidance to the further development of synthetic biology in the light of various external pressures (Kuldell 2007). While reflecting on the importance of public engagement, most team members have interpreted its necessity not only in terms of an educating responsibility they are expected to hold, but also as an act of scientific persuasion towards the lay public:

[Daniel] “There is a lack of information I would say. The thing is, it is our job to like to show people it is not sorcery that it is like actual science […]”
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[Yan-Kay] “[…] we still need to convince the public that it is safe and that it is a viable option. And I think we need this form of communication between scientists and the public about this so that they know”
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[Georgia] “[…] I think that there is not enough public engagement to get them to understand what genetically modified organisms are, or what they do, or are they dangerous. Everybody kind of like, if I talk to people who don’t do science […], [they are] like “can’t that give you cancer or something?”, you know”?

Besides raising public awareness about synthetic biology, with Goodbye AzoDye the team also seeks to bring attention to a relatively unknown and overlooked environmental issue. This meant that the team had to reach a target audience that could be both for and against their project considering the technology they are using for a beneficial cause. The central aspect of their public engagement exercise constitutes the #UncolourMeCurious campaign, which was developed as a way to sensitize the public on “the carcinogenic nature of AzoDye waste products” through the use of “a striking video campaign” to gain the attention. This would “culminate in a beautiful short film to explain the dangers of the ‘azodumping’ […]”, followed by a stakeholder debate, a concept art competition and the creation of ‘textile-based BioArt’ leading up to a grand three-day exhibition (UCL iGEM 2014). The stakeholder debate can be seen as a form of ‘upstream engagement’, which is a way of showing responsiveness to the concerns that live in society in order to make suggestions to rethink scientific practice. Such dual-use engagement, then, can help to promote a process of democratisation which subsequently becomes a normative value for which to strive for in designing policy (Calvert and Martin 2009; Edwards and Kelle 2012).

Interdisciplinarity

Transnational Collaborations