Reimagining responsibility in synthetic biology

Abstract

With the promise to address societal challenges by engineering life, synthetic biology claims the authority to declare what technological futures are possible, desirable, and good. This represents a reimagination and reordering of responsibilities of governance that demands public assessment and deliberation. Yet dominant approaches to assessing social and ethical issues in the biosciences generally neglect the role of scientific authority in configuring responsibilities of governance. This essay offers a diagnosis of this failure and suggestions to address it.

Keywords:

• synthetic biology
• governance
• ethics
• new biology
• deliberation
• democracy

The field of synthetic biology has developed primarily around a vision – a vision of pivoting from a focus on understanding living systems to rendering life a repertoire of parts for use-inspired design (Endy 2005). In practice, the field's identity has taken shape less around specific uses than through imaginations of the usefulness of its (future) achievements: it will engineer life to achieve forms of human benefit that would otherwise be unattainable (Kaebnick, Gusmano, and Murray 2014). Thus, the project of synthetic biology is, in a fundamental sense, predicated on its promise to address, and to take responsibility for, certain societal problems: the field has constructed itself as able to respond, and thus as the right response, to basic problems of human welfare and security. This move of linking (imagined) technological futures to responsibilities of governance is potentially consequential on three levels: first, for the way synthetic biology itself develops as a field (Rabinow and Bennett 2012); second for relations between synthetic biology and society, including the forms of autonomy the former enjoys, the kinds of oversight it is subject to, and the expectations that underwrite public trust in and support for research; and third, for the ways institutions of governance imagine and execute their own responsibilities. These three levels are profoundly coproduced, yet they tend to be conceptualized as distinct. As such, attention to social and ethical issues tends to focus on “societal consequences” of particular technoscientific undertakings, with little attention given to the imaginations of necessity, responsibility, and the good that inform practices of governance.

Many fields in the biosciences have taken to justifying themselves by reference to the putative benefits that they offer to society (Brown and Michael 2003; Rajan 2006). As the case of synthetic biology shows, this mode of self-justification goes beyond the mere instrumentalization of knowledge production to positioning technoscience as an institution of governance: as supplying a conceptual frame – and the institutionalized authority – whereby responsibilities of governance are articulated. For instance, a recent National Research Council report describes a “New Biology” (for which synthetic biology is an exemplar) that “would enunciate and address broad and challenging societal problems” (National Research Council 2009, 3). This is not merely a vision of technoscience, but of governance. With the putative capacity to “address” societal problems, the New Biology likewise claims the authority to “enunciate” them: to designate what promises can be made, what challenges warrant worry, and what sociotechnical futures are possible, desirable, and good.

This vision of governance represents a transfiguration of imaginations of responsibility, of science to society, but likewise of society to science lest society stand in the way of its own future benefits. These reimagined responsibilities come to be codified in notions of how law, democracy, and market should be configured in deference to the futures that the biosciences promise (e.g. Presidential Commission on Bioethical Issues in Biomedical Research 2010; US White House 2014). In this sense, the New Biology represents a significant intervention in orderings of democratic governance, irrespective of whether its technological promises (or risks) are actually realized. It touches upon how the public good is imagined, and upon what forms of deliberation and collective moral sense-making are called upon – or are silenced – in the work of governing science and technology.

Of course, the New Biology's ability to play this role depends on the willingness of democratic institutions to defer to such scientifically authorized accounts. In important respects, therefore, felt social insecurities about the project of synthetic biology are simultaneously about the forms of collective sense-making and institutionalized modalities of public reasoning through which research agendas are made subject to democratic accountability.

The dominant forms of capacity for attending to “social and ethical issues” in biological research that have been incorporated into practices of governance since the 1970s are insufficient to critically appraise these configurations of responsibility, to a large degree because they have contributed to these very configurations in subtle and underappreciated ways. They have tended to treat society as always only able to react to the forms of novelty that science produces: science acts, and society reacts. Science makes revolutions, and society is revolutionized by them. Technology advances and law lags behind. Hence, “ethical, legal and social issues” (ELSI) research has generally focused on “impacts” and “consequences”, chasing after the implications of technological futures and deferring to science to decree what futures are plausible and warrant societal attention. This posture of reactivity is neither inevitable nor necessary, but its effect is to render moral deliberation subsidiary to authoritative imaginations of technological futures. This is de facto a programmatic vision of the right allocations of responsibility between institutions of governance, but one whose political and normative dimensions are occluded (Hurlbut 2015).

These observations have several implications for how “societal dimensions” of synthetic biology and other domains of emerging technology should be approached:

1. Forms and fora of deliberation. Systematic attention should be given to understanding: (a) what forms and fora for deliberation exist; (b) what institutional arrangements – both scientific and democratic – engender opportunities for, or deficiencies in deliberation; and (c) what underlying norms of reasoning and participation configure deliberation and/or render existing regimes immune to democratic correction. I wish to emphasize in particular the quotidian spaces in which deliberation about the appropriateness of research takes place, from the micropractices of institutional biosafety committees, to the macro-scale roles of, for example, scientific experts, public bioethics bodies, and the courts in addressing publicly controversial issues and disciplining public discourse. These are sites in which the terms of controversy and the frameworks of adjudication take shape. Before we can ask whether they function well – whether they are democratic, reasonable and good – we must interrogate the notions of reasonableness, the visions of the good, and the imaginations of democracy that are incipient in them. Attention to deliberation requires not merely asking whether there could be more of it, but asking what institutionalized imaginations of how we should reason together about morally and technically complex matters discipline practices of democratic oversight, and what consequent silencing of voices and occlusion of concerns are thereby affected.

2. ELSI research. Since the 1970s, social and ethical issues have generally been approached in a reactive mode: “ethical issues” get attached to particular technological domains as questions about impacts and implications. This is partly because particular emerging technologies have been treated as the warrant for raising ethical concerns, and scientific declarations about the (im)plausibility of particular technological futures have tended to initiate or close down normative deliberation (Hedgecoe 2010). Technological controversies have come and gone, but modes of reacting to them have come to be patterned and institutionalized. ELSI research in the biosciences has directed remarkably little attention to its own institutionalization and the forms of power and authority it has thereby acquired. This is a serious deficiency, both because it ignores a critical dimension of the landscape of the contemporary biosciences, and because it neglects a range of fundamental normative questions about how societies reason together about, evaluate, and govern their scientific and technological undertakings (Evans 2002; Jasanoff 2005). Ethical and social issues must be attended to as political and institutional features of the biosciences, not merely as epiphenomenal consequences of scientific creativity. Approaching social and ethical issues as always and only the consequences of technoscientific change systematically occludes questions about the forms of authority that configure science–society relations and that have become powerful resources for the political and normative identities of bioscience domains. This dynamic demands particular attention in a field like synthetic biology that claims the authority to enunciate and address societal problems.

Given that the relevant object of analysis in synthetic biology is not a particular technique or technology but the vision of the field itself, attention to social and ethical dimensions must go beyond those issues marked as “ethical” to interrogate the processes whereby they come to be marked as such, and the prior work that goes into differentiating domains of expertise and authority, for instance in delineating issues of science from politics, or facts from values. These processes must be examined as features of institutions rather than as epiphenomena of particular scientific or technological developments, since only the former approach adequately interrogates the forms of institutional power that shape what questions go systematically (un)asked. This task demands robust techniques of empirically grounded social analysis of the sort that Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars have developed for interrogating the coproduction of technoscientific and normative regimes (e.g. Jasanoff 2011). Such research cannot be undertaken as an add-on to scientific research agendas, but must be independent of, broader than, and critically distanced from them.

3. Beyond epiphenomenal consequentialism. As with other areas of emerging technology, social and ethical appraisals of synthetic biology have tended to ask whether it is sufficiently novel to raise new normative questions or pose new problems of governance, and thus to warrant reaction. “What is new here?” becomes a regulative question, rendering normative deliberation contingent upon science's declaration that there is (or will be) something sufficiently novel to produce social consequences that demand assessment, in effect constructing ethical problems as mere epiphenomena of scientific creativity. Normative questions of what is at stake, what is the public good, and who has the authority to define benefits and harms are rendered subsidiary to – and are often silenced by – expert assessments of novelty. This profoundly constrains the forms of moral imagination and public deliberation that can engage with technoscientific projects, privileging a kind of reactive consequentialism over sustained engagement with deontological questions of right and responsibility. Science is authorized to enunciate desirable futures, and thus to imagine the forms of progress to which we ought aspire, while the remit of democratic governance is circumscribed to reacting to consequences. If projects such as synthetic biology are to reflect – and not overpower – our collectively articulated aspirations, we must understand the dynamics that engender such constraints and render them objects of deliberation in themselves.

The greatest, but most fragile achievement of democracy is a social order in which the visions of progress and the good that underwrite imperatives of the present are products of collective imagination. Understanding the place of science in democratic societies requires attending to the ways democracies draw on science to know, reason together, and articulate what is right, in both the epistemic and normative senses of the word. A commitment to responsible research and innovation requires that such capacities of understanding be cultivated, supported, and nurtured.

Notes on contributor

J. Benjamin Hurlbut is an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. His research examines the governance of science and technology, particularly in relation to shifting notions of democracy, religious and moral pluralism, and public reason. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University.