If Synthetic Biology Lets Us Play God, We Need Rules

TIME Ideas Science If Synthetic Biology Lets Us Play God, We Need Rules MOLEKUULBrand X/Getty Images

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Synthetic biology has been called genetic engineering on steroids. Its also been described as so difficult to pin down that five scientists would give you six different definitions. No matter how this emerging field is characterized, one thing is clear: the ability to synthesize and sequence DNA is driving scientific research in brand-new and exciting directions.

In California, scientists have created a breakthrough antimalarial drugbakers yeast made in a lab that contains the genetic material of the opium poppy. The drug has the potential to save millions of livesand to ensure drug production that independent of poppy flowers. At MIT, researchers are working on a way for plants to fix their own nitrogen, so farmers will no longer need to use artificial fertilizers. And, in the far future, scientists and NASA researchers are looking to create a digital biological teleporter to bring to Earth life forms detected on Mars via a sort of biological fax.

What should we worrying about in this moment of tremendous, and potentially cataclysmic, scientific discovery? In advance of the Zcalo/Arizona State University event How Will Synthetic Biology Change the Way We Live?, we asked experts the following question: Soon well be able to program DNA with the same ease we program computers. What new responsibilities will be imposed on us?

1) Stepping ahead of technology to imagine the world we want to live in

Synthetic biology sees life as an engineering project a repertoire of processes that can be reprogrammed to produce technologies and products. It envisions powerful new tools for constructing biological parts. Many in synthetic biology celebrate technologies like automated DNA synthesis as agents of democratization, potentially allowing easy and widespread access to custom-made DNA. According to their vision, these technologies will enable bioengineers to freely experiment with living systems, accelerating progress in innovation and producing enormous benefits for society.

But there are risks. The question is often raised: How can we prevent these technologies from falling into the wrong hands? DNA synthesis machines cannot distinguish between tinkerers and terrorists. Though this question is crucially important, it is revealing for what it leaves unasked. Why are synthetic biologys tinkerers presumed to be the safe hands for shaping the technological future? Why do we defer to their visions and judgments over those that we collectively develop?

We tend to focus governance not on projects of innovation, but on how resulting technologies might be used in society. By attending primarily to technologys misuses, impacts, and consequences, we confine ourselves to waiting until new problemsand responsibilitiesare imposed upon us. Science is empowered to act, but society only to react. This leaves unexamined the question of who gets to imagine the future and, therefore, who has the authority to declare what benefits lie ahead, what risks are realistic, and what worries are reasonable and warrant public deliberation?

Our imaginations of the future shape our priorities in the present. It is a task of democracy, not science, to imagine the world we want to live in. Genuine democratization demands that we embrace this difficult task as our own, rather than wait to react to the responsibilities that emerging technologies impose upon us.

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If Synthetic Biology Lets Us Play God, We Need Rules