Philosophical perspectives on synthetic biology.

Although the emerging field of synthetic biology looks back on barely a decade of development, the stakes are high. It is a multidisciplinary research field that aims at integrating the life sciences with engineering and the physical/chemical sciences. The common goal is to design and construct novel biological components, functions and systems in order to implement, in a controlled way, biological devices and production systems not necessarily found in nature. Among the many potential applications are novel drugs and pesticides, cancer treatments, biofuels, and new materials. According to the most optimistic visions, synthetic biology may thus lead to a biotechnological revolution by transforming microorganisms into ‘factories’ of sorts, which could eventually displace conventional industrial methods. Beyond the immediate interest of natural scientists and engineers, synthetic biology has also attracted the attention of social scientists, economists, and philosophers. As early as 2002, Evelyn Fox Keller, drawing on precursor notions such as Stéphane Leduc’s ‘biologie synthétique’, outlined the aims of synthetic biology in her book Making Sense of Life (2002). In 2006, the anthropologist Paul Rabinow became involved in the work of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), where he created the Center’s Human Practices division, which was itself conceived of as a contribution to ‘anthropological research on the contemporary’ (Rabinow & Bennett, 2009; see www.anthropos-lab.net). By 2007, both the economic potential of synthetic biology (Henkel & Maurer, 2007) and its property rights problems (Rai & Boyle, 2007) had already been explored; simultaneously, over a two-year period in 2007–2008, the European Union’s Synbiosafe project implemented a study on the safety and ethical aspects of the nascent discipline (Schmidt, 2009; Schmidt, Kelle, Ganguli-Mitra, & de Vriend, 2009; see www.synbiosafe.eu). In 2008, a group of researchers at the University of Exeter’s ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis), which included philosopher Maureen O’Malley, sociologist Jane Calvert, and a pair of research students, characterized synthetic biology as a high-profile area of research, driven by the challenge of DNA-based device construction, genome-driven cell engineering and protocell creation (O’Malley, Powell, Davies,