Responsive novelty: taking innovation seriously in societal research agendas for synthetic biology

Abstract

The question of what counts as novel and in what context needs to be systematically investigated in societal research around synthetic biology (SB). This would improve understanding of alternative ways of innovating in response to collective challenges including options for addressing socio-economic inequality as well as and together with technical novelty. Responsiveness to different forms and contexts of novelty might also allow SB to be novel in ways not otherwise considered because of a presumption that it will be developed within established socio-economic systems and models.

Keywords:

• responsible innovation
• synthetic biology
• politics of novelty
• socio-economic

The research problem

Approaches in synthetic biology (SB) have been put forward as novel options for addressing grand challenges such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance. In this context, societal research agendas must include the following questions:

What might constitute novelty in domains interpolated by synthetic biology; according to which criteria; and as determined by whom? Can different visions of novelty be creatively synthesised – if so, how, and to what effect?

Societal research is normally expected to fill in gaps in knowledge produced by scientists and engineers, exploring questions that are not formally part of the scientific/technical agenda for investigation. Such presumed knowledge gaps include questions about the ethical implications of developing and using SB applications; public and stakeholder perceptions of SB; impacts of SB on society; and the regulation of SB research and innovation. Important as these may be, the institutional and disciplinary arrangements structuring this research have created their own blind spots (Balmer et al. 2012). For reasons outlined below, there remains a significant gap in knowing how to make social dimensions really matter to research and innovation.

• Social/ethical matters are treated as spatially, temporally and substantively separate from technical ones. That is to say, they are seen as lying outside the normal spaces of scientific research (e.g. laboratories, journals), to be determined by non-scientists (e.g. ethicists, social scientists, publics, stakeholders, policy-makers) either before technical work begins or after technical challenges have been solved, and to be about opinions and values that cannot themselves be incorporated into research practice (Balmer and Bulpin 2013).

• These divisions mean we know a great deal about how to elicit different societal perspectives but less about how to integrate them into research so that ethical questions such as those framed in terms of ‘social’ or ‘economic’ sustainability (e.g. justice, equality, livelihood, well-being) come to be investigated simultaneously and together with scientific/technical ones (Wiek et al. 2012).

• This demarcation arises because scientists and engineers are expected to determine what is novel or innovative, while social scientists and ethicists are expected to determine how innovation can be done responsibly. In neither case is the question of what constitutes or might constitute innovation considered worthy of systematic investigation in its own right. Rather, what is novel is taken to be a given at the start of new research rather than as a subject of this research.

• The need for more integration of the social and the scientific is important because new technologies may be challenged as much for not being innovative enough as for departing radically from the known and the present.¹ Insofar as they simply slot into existing socio-economic systems and reinforce entrenched problems of inequality and injustice, SB and other emerging technologies may be seen as insufficiently novel and their claims to be addressing grand societal challenges moot.

• There is insufficient attention paid to the politics of novelty (Guston 2013), that is, ways in which a technology might or might not be seen as novel by actors and the reasons why. As a consequence, differences in visions for novel interventions are neglected. Frameworks of responsible innovation (Owen et al. 2013) emphasise the need to open up the innovation process to different visions of innovation, thereby asking not only what if questions (e.g. what if a technology produces undesirable impacts) but also what else ones (e.g. how can innovation be done differently).

Responsive novelty for responsible innovation

Four key dimensions have been put forward for innovation to be responsible: anticipation, deliberation, reflexivity and responsiveness (Owen et al. 2013). To this, we can add a fifth commitment to take innovation itself seriously by expanding the landscape of what is novel in response to different visions (hence, responsive novelty). This means investigating options for innovating in social, industrial, economic, policy and cultural systems as much as and in conjunction with technological innovation (Raman 2014). Research agendas across this landscape would encompass the following.

Contexts of novelty

This involves clarifying the specific domains in which SB is or is not novel: scientific knowledge, technological approach, biophysical risks, economic models of application, social impacts and so on. Specifically, to which set of problems is SB a response and how are these defined – for example, in generic epistemic, sociotechnical, socio-economic, environmental terms or in concrete contexts of application? The next step then is to map different potentially novel solutions to these problem definitions and to investigate how SB might fit or be adapted within this broader picture.

Criteria for assessing novelty

Novelty is not an intrinsic value, rather it should be assessed in relation to the problem to which it is offered as a response (‘innovation’) and framed by the following questions. Can what is proposed as novel further the public good and if so, how? Equally, is it novel enough given collective aspirations for pursuit of the good? And if not, can it be made more innovative in the context of these aspirations? These questions need to be explored alongside concerns about unforeseen risks and consequences.

In conclusion, taking innovation seriously might allow for SB to be novel in ways not envisaged within current market-based economic models (e.g. by creating the space for new ways of building social value rather than just private value). So, rather than assuming that technical efficiency makes SB an economically attractive solution to antimicrobial drug resistance in less-affluent parts of the world (e.g. Takano and Breitling 2012), one might look at socio-economic, institutional and technological models that would allow SB to be developed in ways that are indeed innovative in the societal terms defined at the start. It would also allow for ways of transforming the social world (e.g. addressing poverty and inequality) to be explored in conjunction with SB rather than taken to be separate from it. Through this, there may be opportunities for SB to reconnect with earlier visions of ‘bioengineering’ and biotechnics (Bud 1994) which were seen as distinct from and a corrective to the problems of large-scale industrial systems.

Funding

This work is aligned with the Making Science Public Research Programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust [RP2011-SP-013] and supported in part by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society [CNS-ASU], Arizona State University.

Notes on contributor

Sujatha Raman is Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Making Science Public Research Programme and Visiting Scholar (2014–2015) at CNS-ASU. Her research focuses on the relationship between science, technology and democracy with reference to concepts of publicness; responsible innovation; evidence, expertise and policy-making; energy and environment; and antimicrobial resistance.

Notes

1. This formulation of the problem of innovation is drawn from Safalaoh (2014).