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Prospective Technology Assessment of Synthetic Biology: Fundamental and Propaedeutic Reflections in Order to Enable an Early Assessment

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Abstract

Synthetic biology is regarded as one of the key technosciences of the future. The goal of this paper is to present some fundamental considerations to enable procedures of a technology assessment (TA) of synthetic biology. To accomplish such an early “upstream” assessment of a not yet fully developed technology, a special type of TA will be considered: Prospective TA (ProTA). At the center of ProTA are the analysis and the framing of “synthetic biology,” including a characterization and assessment of the technological core. The thesis is that if there is any differentia specifica giving substance to the umbrella term “synthetic biology,” it is the idea of harnessing self-organization for engineering purposes. To underline that we are likely experiencing an epochal break in the ontology of technoscientific systems, this new type of technology is called “late-modern technology.” —I start this paper by analyzing the three most common visions of synthetic biology. Then I argue that one particular vision deserves more attention because it underlies the others: the vision of self-organization. I discuss the inherent limits of this new type of late-modern technology in the attempt to control and monitor possible risk issues. I refer to Hans Jonas’ ethics and his early anticipation of the risks of a novel type of technology. I end by drawing conclusions for the approach of ProTA towards an early societal shaping of synthetic biology.

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Notes

  1. ProTA shares the earliness approach with Vision Assessment (Grin and Grunwald 2000), Real Time TA (Guston and Sarewitz 2002), Technology Characterization (Gleich et al. 2012; Giese et al. 2015), and hermeneutic TA (Grunwald 2012); however, it complements and extends these concepts.

  2. In applying the four orientations, ProTA complements the broad variety of existing TA (and related) studies on synthetic biology. To mention just a few: European Commission (2005), Miller and Selgelid (2006), de Vriend (2006), Royal Academy of Engineering (2009), European Technology Assessment Group (ETAG) (2009), Schmidt (2009), Schmidt et al. (2009), Giese et al. (2015), and others.

  3. On the one hand, “synthetic biology” seems to be a fairly young term. It was (re-)introduced and presented by Eric Kool in 2000 at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. Since then, the term has gone on to enjoy a remarkable career and general circulation in the scientific communities as well as in science, technology, and innovation politics. On the other hand, the notion of synthetic biology emerged about 100 years ago—although it was rarely mentioned until 2000. It seems more appropriate to consider the more recent understandings of synthetic biology.

  4. The European Technology Assessment Group (ETAG) (2009) uses the term “paradigm” and states that synthetic biology can be considered a “new research paradigm.” See also Schmidt and de Lorenzo (2012).

  5. Nersessian (2012) has investigated the role of engineering concepts in biology and bioengineering, and in particular the concept formation, sense making, and model-based reasoning in problem-oriented sciences. Engineering practice in biology is rather old; however, its explicit perception and acknowledgement seem to be rather new. A similar point can be made regarding the term “synthetic biology.”

  6. Here, interestingly, a kind of Aristotelian understanding of “nature” seems to be present.

  7. For example, the theories and logic of the emerging technosciences (in a wider sense: “epistemology”).

  8. Ray Kurzweil (2005, 265) argues from another perspective: “We already have a set of powerful tools that emerged from AI research and that have been refined and improved over several decades of development. The brain reverse engineering project will greatly augment this toolkit by also providing a panoply of new, biologically inspired, self-organizing techniques.”

  9. And the European Technology Assessment Group (ETAG) (2009) goes on to stress: “Central in their ideas is the concept of self-regulation, self-organization and feedback as essential characteristics of cognitive systems since continuous adaption to the environment is the only way for living systems to survive.”

  10. My translation from German (J.C.S.).

  11. The limited availability (of the systems) becomes more apparent the deeper the technological approach goes. One could say in a more provocative manner that the more late-modern societies, facilitated by (the ideals of) synthetic biologists, seem to control the material world, the more they lose their ability to control it. A control dialectic is present, as Kastenhofer and Schmidt (2011) show.

  12. Therefore, concerns can be raised as to whether “synthetic biology will enable the design of ‘biological systems’ in a rational and systematic way,” as the EU-NEST High-Level Expert Group on emerging technologies claims (European Commission 2005, 5).

  13. The argumentation of Jonas’ ethics is reconstructed in Schmidt (2013).

  14. For an in-depth treatment, analytic clarification, and stimulating discussion of the precautionary principle see Morris (2000), Sandin (1999) and Manson (2002).

  15. This statement holds although it should be obvious that the biological evolution and the development of humans are also based on instabilities; instabilities are the necessary condition for self-organization, evolution, and development.

  16. In formal terms, Jonas is guided by Kant and takes into account the unconditional obligatory quality of duty with the generalizability of his claim. But, unlike Kant, Jonas fills his imperative with material content referring to the future possibility of being. Moreover, Jonas’ imperative, unlike Kant’s, possesses little internally logical stringency (cf. ibid., 11). After all, it may still be logically feasible to will the present good while sacrificing the future good.

  17. Jonas did this explicitly in a book chapter (“Laßt uns einen Menschen klonieren: Von der Eugenik zur Gentechnologie”, in the book “Technik, Medizin und Ethik“, 1985) that has only been published in German.

  18. The new “collaborative kind of technology” seems to be closer to humans and to their actions and self-perceptions; it is not alien to humans like the mechanical type of technology of classic-modern engineering. From the same perspective, and a few decades earlier, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch coined the term “alliance technology” to underline the difference between mechanical and biology-based technology (Bloch 1995). According to Bloch, we may call a technology based on self-organization “alliance technology.” Today, however, beyond Bloch’s thoughts, we need to consider the high ambivalence of this type of technology.

  19. Jonas had this in mind when he formulated his precautionary principle. Jonas believed that we should stick to classic-modern technology. His conception of adequate technology is therefore, in some respects, very similar to what Endy (2005) advocates.

  20. Dupuy states: “The unpredictable behavior […] means that engineers will not know how to make [… these] machines until they actually start building them” (Dupuy 2004, 18). The famous physicist Richard Feynman is quoted as saying: “What I cannot create, I do not understand” (cf. Schwille and Diez 2009, 223).

  21. In line with these concerns, Bill Joy warns about the dangers of the well-known and highly disputed dystopia: the “gray goo” (Joy 2000).

  22. In Gleich et al. (2012) the “systems type of synthetic biology” is analyzed and assessed in more detail.

  23. This is in line with Nordmann’s concerns as to whether we can cope with this kind of technology (cf. Nordmann 2005, 2008). His objections are far-reaching: “This is a critique no longer of what we do to nature in the name of social and economic control. Instead it is a critique of what we do to ourselves as we surrender control to pervasive technical systems” (Nordmann 2008, 182).

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Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges two anonymous referees and the editor, and also Bernd Giese (University of Bremen, Germany) and Wolfgang Liebert (University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria) for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Haardtring 100, 64295, Darmstadt, Germany

    Jan Cornelius Schmidt

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Schmidt, J.C. Prospective Technology Assessment of Synthetic Biology: Fundamental and Propaedeutic Reflections in Order to Enable an Early Assessment. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 1151–1170 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9673-x

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