Writing for a special issue of Royal Society Interface on synthetic biology, Steven Yearley, a member of the Genomics Policy and Research Forum sponsored by the UK's Environmental and Social Research Council, claims the regulatory and ethical concerns around the technology go hand-in-hand with the hype. And, to a certain extent, agrees with the idea that Big Promise technologies, by having bold claims made for them, wind up the concern to the point that extra regulation becomes inevitable:
"...once these assertions about far-reaching novelty or widespread applicability are made the regulatory implications are hard to avoid. The more strongly the claims are put forward, the more powerful the apparent regulatory logic.
"Proponents of synthetic biology need to make claims about its startling novelty and wide-ranging implications if they are to win support, yet they cannot make these claims without simultaneously raising questions about suitable safety and regulatory standards."
I'm not entirely convinced by this. Although you can see the effect proposed by Yearley reflected in the concern over nanotechnology, I think synthetic biology poses greater ethical and regulatory concerns to people because of the issue of dealing with life. You also have the shadow of genetically modified organisms hanging over it, which has encouraged government-funded organisations to focus very much on ethics and regulation in the hope of heading off another GMO crisis.
However, it is interesting to consider how things might have gone if J Craig Venter had not beaten the drum so hard on his lab's work.
Yearley's main point is that any ethical review of synthetic biology has to dispense with the kinds of framing used for bioethics so far. In other words, bioethics is not up to the job of determining the ethics of a synthetic biology. This is not as bizarre as it sounds: Yearley's argument is that bioethics narrowed its focus because that was what the main players wanted. Yearley does not make the argument directly but mentions an issue raised by the 1999 paper by Cho and Caplan, which was the first foray into this area, that because synthetic biology could challenge the popular view of what gives the living life any ethical debate has to take that into account. This is not something that traditional bioethics has had to deal with much, other than deciding at which point an organism has a distinct identity.
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