Team:UCL/Humans/Soci/2

What is often characteristic of new and emerging technologies and their associated governance measures is that they show a higher degree of scientific uncertainty, and appear to cross various borders. This is what Zhang et al. (2011) have pointed out to be especially true for synthetic biology as it puts an even stronger emphasis on these governance challenges for modern science. The main reasons for this is that, on the one hand, the uncertainty comes from the lack of predictability and awareness of increasing 'non-knowing' with regard to the technology, and on the other hand, the 'cross-borderness' related to various interconnecting aspects of synthetic biology (Zhang et al 2011).

At the core of assessing synthetic biology as a discipline which involves scientific uncertainty is the premise that this new and emerging technology is still at the beginning stage of trying to understand how things actually work and how they will affect society. This is a factor that needs to be taken into account since it implies that talking about synthetic biology in terms of risk is still something that is out of reach as risks are about having the necessary knowledge and tools to actually determine how great the risk is. To do this for synthetic biology cannot yet be done with full certainty considering that its scientific practices possess certain properties that make the calculability of risks considerably more difficult. Making a prediction of how a synthetic microorganism would behave does not become more manageable even if a new genetic circuit and its parts are well understood. Unforeseen and unintended consequences to health and the environment thus go broader than the concept of risk which cannot even be controlled by research institutions with considerable legitimacy. The issue of governance for synthetic biology therefore is more about "regulating the implications of uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy", rather than regulating what can be known through risk management assessments (Zhang et al. 2011: 8-9).

The uncertainty challenge becomes even greater when synthetic biology is discussed in terms of dual-use implications, where a civilian use of the technology can be translated into military ends. In the life sciences, risk as such already poses a difficult question as self-replicating qualities of biological systems mean that it becomes more difficult to document the exchange of various genetic material. This places the threshold to create biological weaponry at a slightly lower level considering that it becomes a challenge to trace the source of production. Moreover, as the applications of biotechnology becomes more widespread, the scale at which policy mechanisms need to hold perpetrators accountable become difficult to oversee. Furthermore, in order to acquire the skills to practice synthetic biology, one has to overcome a considerable degree of so-called tacit knowledge inherent to the scientific process. A large and heterogeneous group of specialists are required to cooperate and share their skills and experiences in order to make knowledge production possible. This experience is essential to the process because the long time that can be devoted to practice eventually lets the acquired skill be based on intuition rather than a clear set of steps that need to be taken. Such intricate relation between humans and non-humans illustrate how the practicing synthetic biology can be described as a socio-technical assemblage of knowledge production (Tucker 2011).

However, the opposite of this is also true considering that the requirement of tacit knowledge is undermined by a de-skilling trend in synthetic biology. While the former has led to the black-boxing of the scientific process to create synthetic microorganisms, increasingly, with a sufficient amount of basic skills, taking part in the advance of synthetic biology nowadays has ceased to be merely exclusive to a specific set of highly trained specialists (Tucker 2011). The reason for this is that the design and fabrication of genetic circuits is realized through the making of modularized components called BioBricks, which are designed and standardized so that they are readily available to different synthetic biologists, and applied for a particular function through the use of fairly basic tools in genetic engineering. Moreover, the provision of these BioBricks works via the centrally organized Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The resulting objective is one of more efficient, cheaper, and more predictable ways of doing the work, which ultimately benefits the synthetic biology community. Nevertheless, due to this modularity and de-skilling, non-experts can become sufficiently proficient and thus contribute to technological development as well (Mukunda et al. 2009; Tucker 2011).

The consistency that comes with the standardization of genetic parts and modules therefore brings the dual use of synthetic biology closer to being a reality. Nevertheless, creating novel pathogens remains considerably far from what is practically possible as there are still quite a few operational difficulties left to resolve before a straight line can be drawn from de-skilling to the prevalence of acts of bioterrorism. However, vigilance remains of importance in response to do-it-yourself synthetic biology movements and how-to protocols as misuse by non-state actors, who can now have greater access, cannot be excluded as a problem (Kelle 2012; Tucker 2011). Such non-state actors certainly became more prominent in the aftermath of the Cold War since biosecurity issues were now facilitated by weakening international borders. Many new actors from various geographical levels of organisation emerged during this time in response to this development, which in turn undermined the authority of governments in favour of an emerging governance structure. Especially after the anthrax attacks of 2001, biosecurity gained prominence as an issue through such initiatives as a verification protocol to reinforce the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. When this eventually failed, states now had to start negotiations with non-governmental stakeholders in order to set up agreements on dual-use practices. Nevertheless, the international politics related to dual-use governance remained predominantly based on a state-centred framework (Nightingale and McLeish 2009).

Another challenging property of synthetic biology for governance, then, relates to its interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature. In order for synthetic biology to devise solutions for a plethora of practical problems, the discipline needs a variety of various other disciplines to come together. Synthetic biology, in fact, forms a nexus for biology, chemistry, engineering, computational science, information technology and nanotechnology. It has therefore also been called a converging technology, creating ever greater possibilities for innovation within a highly heterogeous space of scientific knowledge production. Furthermore, besides the crossing of borders relating to political power and scientific disciplines, synthetic biology also urges initiatives to transcend the realms of nation states through an increasingly global and international diffusion of the technology. Progress in synthetic biology has to a greater extent been marked by the efforts of transnational programs which have created a dynamic enabling collaboration between scientists and non-scientists regardless of the geopolitical underpinnings (Pauwels 2011; Tucker 2012; Zhang 2013).

In conclusion, all these facets of cross-borderness inherent to synthetic biology question the ways how appropriate governance measures should be devised. In contrast to many other modern sciences, synthetic biology is rather unambiguous in forging synergetic structures considering that the cross-borderness appears to necessitate such an approach. Moreover, the aforementioned uncertainty also affirms the need for alternative governance measures considering that science cannot function anymore as an infallible authority for policy-making as their pursuit for more knowledge usually prompts new scientific questions and new uncertainties (Zhang et al. 2011). Sheila Jasanoff (2003) has called the condition in which scientists are confident to resolve uncertainty with the term technologies of hubris, in which "the unknown, unspecified, and indeterminate aspects of scientific and technological developments remain (...) treated as beyond reckoning, they escape the discipline of analysis" (Jasanoff 2003: 239). The result is that policy-makers are refrained from taking this into account despite that it is inherent to the scientific reality (Zhang et al. 2011). Consequently, "unknown, unspecified and indeterminate" factors are withheld from being the subject of discussion, forcing the debate to close down so that uncertainties persist to be incorrectly defined in terms of risks. This then seemingly perpetuates the idea that potential problems can be rendered calculable and thus manageable (Zhang et al. 2011).