Team:UCL/Humans/Soci/4

Seeking Ecological Innovation

Many emerging technologies have often been proclaimed to be paramount when it comes to addressing the impediments to sustainable developments in society. This also applies to synthetic biology as it promises to deliver solutions in wide range of areas that require innovative efforts. The U.S. National Research Council, for example, has indicated that this kind of New Biology has the potential to bring great benefit to society in terms of the sustainable production of food and biofuels, the restoration of ecosystems, and the improvement of human health (National Research Council (U.S.) et al. 2009: 6). There is an ongoing narrative which describes the impact of synthetic biology in revolutionary terms as to how ecological issues are being addressed. This suggests that this narrative follows a discourse of ecological modernisation in the way technological innovation enables society to set out a trajectory for social and environmental change (Mol and Jänicke 2009). Organisers of the iGEM competition hold on to this conceptual premise as well. In his final address to the competitors of iGEM 2013, the President of the iGEM Foundation, Randy Rettberg, compared the future development of synthetic biology with the invention of tools that sparked revolutionary changes throughout the course of history. According to him, during the industrial revolution and information revolution, the machine and the computer respectively have been the cause for these kind of drastic changes. Both technologies, he argues, ‘changed everything’ since energy and information appeared to be ‘a fundamental aspect of nature’. In the light of synthetic biology, he predicts however that ‘the next revolution’ will be ‘about being good at material’ using biological systems as the appropriate tools (iGEM 2013b).

This technological optimism has also been translated into finding solutions for environmental problems as part of the discourse of the iGEM competition. Teams are required to assign their projects to a specific categorical ‘track’ of their choice so that they can “focus […] towards a specific subject area within synthetic biology and […] know who they will compete against for the track award” (iGEM 2014g). As a solution to a specific environmental problem, the Goodbye AzoDye Project of UCL iGEM 2014 has been assigned to the Environment Track, which has been described in terms of “tackl[ing] massive environmental problems [of certain local or regional areas]” by teams that can learn from these problems and become passionate in finding a solution for it. These are the principles that make up a major part of the philosophy of the iGEM competition (iGEM 2014h). Moreover, it is stated in the track description that the health of the environment is directly related to the wellbeing of all life and that this can be enhanced with the help of the biosciences: “The quality of the air, water, and land, both on Earth and other heavenly bodies, limits the happiness of humans and other creatures. Can biotechnology be used to help clean the air, provide fresh drinking water, restore or enhance soil quality, terraform a near-Earth asteroid, or protect, preserve, or enhance natural biological diversity” (iGEM 2014i)? Hence, this view very much corresponds with the way ecological modernisation envisions technology to bring about the necessary interventions to prevent further environmental decline.

Seeking Industrial Innovation

The aim of the project to bring ecological innovation implies to a certain extent a change in industrial practice as well. The selection of the azo dye project was preceded by a process in which team members conceived their own project proposals. By making the project revolve around the issue of azo dye leaching, the team pursues a form of industrial innovation that is indicative of the ecological modernisation framework considering its attempt to match ecological concerns to economic aspirations. Joseph Huber, who is considered to be the founding father of ecological modernisation theory, has coined the rethinking of how industrial production should be realised through advanced technologies, with the term ‘super-industrialisation’. Hence, through various organisational levels, namely the iGEM Foundation and competition, the categorical group of the Environment Track and on the level of the team itself, this discourse of using synthetic biology as a technological instrument for reform becomes rather explicit. This is especially salient as many environmental and energy-related projects are always potential real-life industrial solutions for pressing ecological issues. In many ways, ecological modernisation is primarily instrumental as a discourse for policy-making purposes. However, at its core, the competition itself is in first instance about creating an incentive for future pioneers of science and technology to create clean technologies by using novel methods and approaches in biotechnology (Murphy and Gouldson 2009), or in this case, synthetic biology to enable a green chemistry for industrial dyeing processes.

The industrial innovation that is aimed for in the Goodbye AzoDye Project is in fact purposefully limited to an end-of-pipe solution in the process of textile dyeing in order to prevent the breakdown of azo dyes in leaching waste water into the environment. The proposed solution is therefore characteristic of an eco-modernist solution that is very much typical of environmental policy discourse in the 1970s and 1980s (Mol 1996). This is in contrast with the development of clean technologies and their application in industry so that processes of production are required to be restructured. This, however, implies an expensive investment with a higher degree of complexity to make the change actually happen. Therefore, technologies that are able to control a potentially polluting process without significant structural change, are preferred over others. The choice of the team to meet this cost-benefit analysis made by the textile dye industry can hence be interpreted as a pragmatic choice, demonstrating their affinity with market demands. Furthermore, from a scientific point of view, synthetic biology clearly has the capacity to invent a new dye altogether with the same product-related qualities but without its harmful effects (Murphy and Gouldson 2009). However, delivering such a clean technology lies beyond the given timeframe of the team as it means that a higher level of genetic engineering skills and material would be needed to accomplish it, as indicated by team member Georgia:

"If you build something entirely new, it usually takes years opposed to months to actually get a characterization of, understand a problem enough to actually do something about it. So it's kind of impossible to start from the very very beginning"

The members of the team have been aware of the limits of the product they want to present. While discussing the topic, they also addressed the presumption that, from the environmentalist perspective, one could argue that their own strategy, indeed, does not dispose of the use of the chemical substance that causes mutagenic and carcinogenic activity in the first place. Notwithstanding that they are treating an ecological hazard that originates from industrial activity, team member Adam pointed out this contradiction in their project:

“I think our project is such quite a good example of how our environmentally-based project, that we always have our scientist hats on, [saying] “this is quite a good solution, that’s the best bacteria that can degrade azo dyes”, and the environmentalist would say “you are using azo dyes in the first place, a toxic compound, is there a better alternative we can use in dyeing textiles”? We always kind of forget that there’s more and more to solve a problem”.

The emphasis here lies on the fact that the team acknowledges that their solution does not meet the requirements of the ecologically-modern society. It is also the nature of the problem that adds a constraining factor to how solutions can be devised. Some of the team members illustrated this by making a metaphorical analogy with the medical sciences:

[Tanel] “This is an honest problem where you notice the problem and then you look at it…”
[Adam] “…Are we treating the symptoms of the disease or the disease itself”?
[Georgia] “Yeah, but the disease is just so awesome”.
[Daniel] “The disease is incurable I would say in our case”.

Looking for the better solution which would engender the necessary institutional reform to ‘ecologise’ the economy, is something that all team members evidently would prefer. However, as a matter of pragmatic concern, organisational constraints necessitate an intermediate pathway for UCL iGEM 2014 to solve the azo dye problem, while others would rather say that the nature of the issue is insurmountable:

[Daniel] ‘I mean it would great, it would be fun if natural dyes, even awesome, to stick to clothes very tightly and – but the thing is right now azo dyes are worth 70 per cent of all dye production in textile, cosmetics. They constitute the whole basis of how we understand fashion and cosmetic industry and maybe we should aim to change that, but thing is, the problem is there are right now and I think the chances to reconvert the whole industry are very low so at least we are tackling the problem derived from the use of azo dyes’.

[Philipp] ‘So your argument would be, put simply, there might be a better solution but we shouldn’t wait (…)’.

[Daniel] ‘Not an immediate solution and I think in an immediate timeline, there is a problem that needs to be talked about …’

[Philipp]‘But you were saying is that, okay fair enough, but when you have this immediate solution you might make the search for a better solution’.

[Daniel]‘Yeah, of course’.

[Philipp] ‘It’s a trade-off between those. So otherwise you would make a better solution for such a perfect natural compound, why would anyone care now that azo dyes have been solved? But that’s just a …’

[Edoardo] ‘But when nobody ever talks about azo dyes, the better solution will never be found. The better solution that makes people think “how should we have a better solution”…’

[Yan-Kay] ‘We need to explore our intermediate pathway, else, we can still find a better solution using dyes (…)’.

From a reflexive point of view of risk society theorists, the attempts of the team are about tackling an environmental issue which was produced by the industrial society. Such an attempt can be seen as a way of mending the shortcomings of what would be called a ‘semi-modern’ institution (i.e. technology and business in the context of industrial society) fixed on material production. Moreover, science and technology are perceived here to have adopted the role of ‘guardian and constructor of taboos’ in the sense that agency in the risk society is steered by overly depending on risk analyses and risk management schemes to further a rational train of logic. Instead of putting into question the way traditional scientific rationality is practiced, science is compared to “a washing machine, as a symbolic detoxicator, as a sedative to suppress the worst fears” (Mol and Spaargaren 1993: 441).