In late 2016, Engineering Life hosted the third of its fourth experimental workshops, on Mapping Synthetic Biology Workflows. Collaborative work between engineering biology (or, alternatively, synthetic biology) and the social sciences has been around nearly as long as the field has. But while opportunity for collaborative work abounds, how to go about this collaboration isn’t always straightforward.  How to get individuals with different research goals, disciplinary jargon, styles of knowing things, and, importantly, relative power in shared projects, working productively on a shared goal or object, is far from obvious.  This particular interdisciplinary workshop went well enough that we decided it would be worth sharing in a report.

The workshop in question was a day-long event hosted at Arizona State University, organized around the idea of ‘workflows’ in synthetic biology. A banal enough seeming object, workflows can be seen to exemplify a key aim of synthetic biology – to make biological research more efficient by borrowing tools and practices from engineering. As social scientists on the Engineering Life team, we have grown used to seeing images of cyclical workflows containing “design,” “build,” “test,” and sometimes “learn” elements in synthetic biology presentations and articles. But we were curious to understand what lies behind this seemingly simple representation of work. Despite the consistency of this particular symbol in the field’s self-presentation, how you actually make biological work more efficient – with its tacit knowledge, lab drudgery, and capricious microbes and enzymes – is far from obvious to an outsider (and maybe even to an insider). And importantly, it’s not clear that this is strictly a technical exercise.  Value judgements and priorities are made along the road in deciding what practices to streamline, automate, or re-work; and so, a workflow, in an oblique, innocuous way, can open a conversation into what changes in practices, priorities, and knowledge production are underway in the field.

Image credit: Bridging the Gap: A Roadmap to Breaking the Biological Design Barrier – Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/When-analyzing-synthetic-biology-against-a-classic-design-build-test-cycle-A-analysis_fig8_272080725 [accessed 25 Feb, 2020]

The workshop itself involved synthetic biology practitioners from academia, industry, and national labs working alongside social scientists to map out and explore some of the ‘workflows’ being developed in their laboratories and facilities.  We deliberately left the idea of a ‘workflow’ open-ended to see what practitioners would decide to map out.  The 18 workshop participants split up into small groups; they spent the morning mapping out two different workflows underway in their facilities, and the afternoon troubleshooting, or debugging, the workflows generated in the morning.

These basic prompts allowed participants to work collaboratively on creating and exploring workflows from multiple perspectives. Moreover, both synthetic biology practitioners and social scientist participants said the exercise helped them see things they hadn’t noticed before.  In our report, we distill some of the key themes that arose. My personal favorite among these were the reflections on rationalization, especially as they were talked about through what we called “zombie processes.” (The event happened shortly after Halloween, and the term “zombie process” may or may not have been inspired by ghostly stickers that were available for participants to use in their ‘debugging’ activities…) Participants started to use the label of ‘zombies’ in a workflow to refer to vestigial processes and practices that served no apparent practical purpose in the current version of a given process. But they also weren’t seen as critical to remove. Particularly given how little we know about the mechanics of biology relative to other engineering processes, it can be hard to predict whether small, seemingly inconsequential elements of an existing process could dramatically affect other parts of a workflow. So, in a process of continual, cyclical improvement, practices that made sense in the beginning can get baked in, even if they no longer seem necessary – and part of the work of rationalization and continuous improvement is retaining these seemingly irrational elements.

We wrote this workshop report to capture key ideas and discussions from the day for those who participated in the workshop, and also as a point of reference for others interested in and experimenting with methods for collaboration among social scientists and the science and engineering community. I found the exercise helpful enough that I’ve adapted the workshop format for some of my own fieldwork in industry settings.  Some of my interest in studying synthetic biology industry includes exploring how public-facing, often inflationary, booster-ish rhetoric can be different from the slower, more modest realities inside these facilities. Holding workflow mapping workshops during my fieldwork has been helpful for me and my research participants to break out of the often conditioned, sometimes plain canned discussions of an interview setting; and also gives a bit more of a bird’s-eye view of process and strategy than participant observation of daily lab work might reveal.

So, for those interested in the particulars of how biological work is being negotiated and transformed in synthetic biology, or for those more broadly interested in collaborative methods and approaches for working across disciplines, please check out our short, colorful report with plenty of pictures from the event.

Workflows report (pdf)

Resurrecting the Sublime is a synthetic biology based artwork which presents the scents of extinct plants. A collaboration between synthetic biologist and designer Christina Agapakis, IFF supported olfactory researcher and artist  Sissel Tolaas, and artist Daisy Ginsberg, the artwork is produced through a combination of techniques, materials, and ideas from art and biotechnology. The result is an imagined fragrance from an extinct plant made possible by synthetic biology and olfactory research situated in a setting which includes pumice-type rocks, digital landscape renderings, and herbarium specimen images to invoke the plant’s original but lost habitat. By incorporating the sense of smell into the lost landscape, the artists gesture at the less obvious elements which are now missing: it is not only the individual plant but the habitat which is extinct. In the installation, the smeller links the smell and the landscape, reuniting them. Resurrecting the Sublime required the expertise of artists, designers, botanists, biochemists, biological engineers, and perfumers. It reaches for an aesthetic experience of the unknowable by presenting the possibility of fragrance of flowers which are now extinct using synthetic biology techniques. This work will be installed as part of the Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in Raleigh, NC in the fall of 2019. The show will be sponsored by the North Carolina State University’s Center for Genetic Engineering in Society (GES) and the NCSU Libraries Exhibits Program.

Resurrecting the Sublime functions as a provocation and critique of attempts to recreate living organisms from extinct genome fragments. Once the genetic sample is sequenced, paleogeneticists assist in identifying gene pathways that produce fragrant enzymes. The gene sequences are then synthesised, inserted into yeast, and cultured to produce the molecules, which are then extracted. Inhaled together, the samples offer a multidisciplinary approximation of the smell of a no longer living flower. In displaying alternative scents, the work emphasizes the role of interpretation in filling in the unknown elements between what can be gleaned through these sampling methods and what is lost beyond those technologies. Paleogenetists and botanists can help, but the situation necessitates interpretation.

This artwork implicitly asks what is not present when scientists attempt to recreate organisms based on limited genetic information and explores the limitations of the interpretation of genetic material based on preserved specimens alone. In this art-science work, the role of interpretation is brought to the fore on the sides of both synthetic biology and art. It also shows what is possible in art-science collaborations between different types of experts. The display of the scents always involves guesswork, since even when the scent-producing molecules are known, their exact proportions are not.

From in vitro meat created by Tissue Culture & Art to demonstrate the technical and aesthetic limitations of the technology even as companies rushed to commercialize the imagined applications of lab grown flesh, to Paul Vanouse’s Latent Figure Protocol which drew attention to the role of private labs in testing DNA samples for government agencies, the role of corporations in biotechnology have been the subject of many bioart critiques. Resurrecting the Sublime is no exception. Indeed this artwork adds questions about the way that conservation figures in a context where novel genetic material has new commercial value, and about the right to use extinct materials for profit, particularly those samples of now-extinct organisms gathered before the advent of the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization (ABS). These questions are interestingly complicated by the fact that Agapakis is the lead designer for Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based company specializing in the creation of synthetic biology designs and scaling technologies that intends to eventually commercialize these scents.

Resurrecting the Sublime participates in a broader debate about the ways in which emerging biotechnologies can and should be used. It implicitly questions attempts to recreate other extinct species and the technical and ethical fallacies of replacement. The multiple possible fragrances the project offers suggests the difficulties of working with the limited genetic samples available from extinct organisms. Ideas about recreating an extinct organism are bound up with whether we can conceptualise a species outside its ecological niche. Through this aesthetic and accessible encounter, the project raises questions about what we lose when a species is lost and only its DNA remains. It offers us a sense of the plant through our senses, which offers visitors the bodily experience of the loss of a species.

As a step toward creating this Resurrecting the Sublime, Agapakis prototyped her ideas in a related artwork, Extinct Perfume. This piece displays three speculative aromas based on an extinct flowering plant, Hesperelaea palmeri created using conventional perfuming techniques. This prototype for Resurrecting the Sublime was shown at the Field Trial of Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology at the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) in Raleigh, NC in 2017.

Christina Agapakis’ Extinct Perfume. Under three glass cloches are different versions of the scent of Guadalupe Island flower, which will never be smelled again. perfumes created by Symrise: Isaac Sinclair, Fanny Grau, and Maurice Roucel and scans of horticultural specimens at Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology at The Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC. Photo credit: York Wilson.

Christina Agapakis with Extinct Perfumes at Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology. Photo Credit: York Wilson.

Exhibits in the area of biotechnology are social and political interventions. Curators must necessarily take a stance as they invite visitors into public space that is the site of interventions, be they aesthetic, social, or technical. In the case of Resurrecting the Sublime, questions are being raised about a technology many visitors are familiar with through the popularized Jurassic Park vision of the DNA sequencing of dinosaurs and recent press coverage of the Woolly Mammoth Project. Given her research in this area and work at Ginkgo Bioworks, Agapakis is at the cutting edge of her field, yet in her artwork she emphasizes conservation over the potential for synthetic biology’s application in this area. The inevitable conclusion of this work is that synthetic biology can never be enough to completely replace the lost flower’s smell. Whatever the potentials of synthetic biology, they are no replacement for conservation practices. In this way, the piece both shows what synthetic biology can do and asks what it cannot. This artwork raises the kinds of questions scholars of science and technology frequently ask: what is the status of new knowledge and how should we understand its potential benefits and challenges for society?

Artists have long been involved with genetic interventions. Edward Steichen manipulated the chromosomes of delphiniums using colchicine, a home technique for creating plant mutants which was common at the time (Curry 2016). He selected those with large inflorescences and worked on cross breeding delphiniums for more than two decades. In 1936, he debuted a display of the oversized flowers at the MoMA. Steichen simultaneously aestheticized the genetic possibilities for the delphinium, while demonstrating the democratized power of these techniques for non-scientists who could engage with genetics with a few simple tools.

The Museum of Modern Art Archives. “Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums,” June 24–July 1, 1936

Continuing in this tradition of artistic experiments with genetics, the Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology Field Trial included work on genetics from bioartist Adam Zaretsky, CPNH curator and artist Rich Pell, visual artist Kristen Stollen, School of Visual Arts’ Biodesign Challenge team, animator Jon Davis, and the musical group Cyanotype. The artworks chosen for display recontextualize genetic information by bringing it out of the lab and into everyday situations. Biotechnology and art are fascinatingly intertwined, from our aesthetic appreciation of plants and animals which brought about breeding regimens to art about ethics in the genomic age. Dimensions of both biotechnology and art are on display through this exhibit. Viewers’ perceptions of art and science shape the politics of meaning ascribed to the pieces in Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology.

As an STS scholar and the curator for the exhibit, I have been interested in exploring the potential of an exhibit on technology with potentially complex social and political results, while also considering the way that artworks, particularly those that involve scientific expertise or technical materials, are understood by visitors. The exhibit aimed to engage the public about the social uses (familiar and new) that this technology might offer through provocative contemporary art which dealt directly with these technologies or offered new ways of contextualizing them.

Artworks like Resurrecting the Sublime and many others to be included in the 2019 Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology exhibit expand conversations about how art and science—in this case genetic engineering and biotechnology—are shaped by the work of artists, scientists, and the public. This exhibition aims to provoke visitors to think about their power in relationship to genetics and how non-scientists can shape debates and intervene in the social and technical processes around biotechnological developments.

More at the Resurrecting the Sublime website: resurrectingthesublime.com

Acknowledgements

Very many thanks to all of the artists whose work appeared at CAM: Paul Vanouse, Richard Pell, Kirsten Stolle, Adam Zaretsky, John Davis, and Cyanotype; to the project team: Molly Renda, Fred Gould, Todd Kuiken, Chris Vitello, Elizabeth Pitts, Patti Mulligan, Sharon Stauffer, and particularly Christina Agapakis and Jane Calvert for their consultation in the development of this post.

Engineering Life has launched a new website—‘Doing Engineering’—that presents different perspectives on engineering in a novel and playful way. The website is based on one of our workshops and like that workshop, tries to find diverse and enlightening ways to approach and answer the question, ‘what is engineering?’

The workshop, in retrospect

‘Doing Engineering’ was the first of Engineering Life’s experimental interdisciplinary workshops. Our project focuses on the interaction of synthetic biology and engineering in their many different forms. As a result, we dedicated our first workshop to exploring just what constitutes ‘engineering.’ We invited synthetic biologists, engineers, social scientists, policy-makers, philosophers and historians for a day of presentations, conversations and reflections.

‘Doing Engineering’ involved three dialogues, two roundtable discussions and three final reflections. The dialogues and discussions focused the basics of what engineering involves and what being an engineer entails, the engagement of synthetic biology with engineering, and the particular challenges faced by those trying to engineering with living things. The reflections were prepared by three participants as the day progressed, and each provided a distinctive perspective on what we accomplished through our dialogues and discussions.

However, the day began with each person introducing himself or herself. In the spirit of experimentation, we asked each participants to provide us with an image that for them captures what engineering is. As part of introducing ourselves, we explained why we chose that particular image. The images and the thoughts expressed differed from each other in many ways and captured how complex and diverse our understandings of engineering are. We found them so interesting that we decided to share them with a broader audience.

‘Doing Engineering,’ the website

The ‘Doing Engineering’ website offers visitors the chance to explore what images our participants chose and what they said about them. It offers a unique way to approach the question, ‘what is engineering?’ It also allows visitors to chart their own path through our participants’ thoughts.

The home page of the website presents our participants’ images, as interpreted by illustrator Sara Julia Campbell. Upon clicking any of our participants’ images, a visitor is taken to a page which presents selections from what that particular participant told us about engineering. If clicked, each of those quotations reveals three quotations by other participants that capture similar ideas or offer a contradictory viewpoint. That is, each quotation reveals thoughts that expand, enlighten or challenge it. These thoughts by others also serve as links to different pages, each with those others’ image and thoughts. These labyrinthine links let visitors decide how to wander through our many thoughts on engineering.

We offer people ideas, rather than tell them what to think. There is no single view of engineering that we advocate or hold to be better than the others. The ‘Doing Engineering’ website is a tool for people to explore engineering and with which to develop their own conclusions and opinions.

Join our exploration

Visit ‘Doing Engineering’ and join us in our exploration of synthetic biology and engineering! Navigate your way through the images and ideas that we collected and discover new ways to think about professions that shape our world and our societies in countless ways.

Last month, I attended the annual synthetic biology conference, Synthetic Biology UK 2018 (SBUK2018). For those unfamiliar with the field’s conference landscape, SBUK is an annual event positioned as “the premiere UK synthetic biology meeting”. It is organised by the Biochemical Society and normally supported in some capacity by the hosting organisation for that year. This year, SBUK2018 was hosted and co-organised by BrisSynBio, the University of Bristol’s Synthetic Biology Centre (and one of the six major Synthetic Biology Centres in the UK).

Over the two days, SBUK2018 showcased some fascinating science and some clever tools and techniques. Highlights for me included two inspiring talks on protocell development by researchers from the University of Bristol and the Max Planck Institute, an engaging talk about advances in analysing complex biological mixtures, and some great start-up mentality. Richard Owen also managed to insert a cat meme into his slides so also automatically deserves credit.

Figure 1. SBUK2018’s one and only instance of cat meme usage

However, inspiring science and cats aside, what struck me most about SBUK2018 were the organisational barriers hindering social and scientific integration.

For me, this started with the very identity and orientation of the event itself. In effect, there were two parallel conferences: one to discuss the science, another to discuss the social dimensions. ‘SBUK2018’ itself was publicised as a two-day conference containing the ‘science programme’. Meanwhile, a separately run three-day programme of “synthetic biology satellite sessions, workshops and public engagement activities aligned with SBUK2018” was organised by BrisSynBio’s umbrella institute, Bristol BioDesign Institute (BBI). This included two afternoons dedicated to discussing responsible research and innovation (RRI), another event highlighting different social dimensions of synthetic biology (such as biosecurity, sustainability, language use, and art), and a public engagement session.

The epistemic distance created by having two programmes was reinforced by their actual physical organisation. The two RRI workshops overlapped with the science programme, forcing delegates to choose between scientific and social dimensions. These sessions were also held in separate buildings, quashing any casual idea of ‘dipping in and out’ of parallel sessions. The rest of the social science and public engagement activities were held after the science programme ended. Judging by the attendance at the science programme’s final presentations, few remained until the end of the science let alone any ‘book-ending’ peripheral events.

Meanwhile, the 25 scientific presentations of the science programme focused on tools, techniques, results and outcomes with negligible intellectual engagement of any broader social dimensions. The science programme did include two presentations and 10 posters discussing RRI; however, subsequent individual discussions I had with scientists about RRI were largely about its efficacy or confusion over what much of it meant. Additionally, many social science colleagues just outright missed parts of the science programme by simple merit of attending their own events. These examples do not, of course, do justice to the positive experiences I had, nor the complexity of engagement between scientists and social scientists. However, I couldn’t help but feel the positive interactions occurred despite the conference organisation, not because of it.

The distribution of event planning activities across multiple bodies itself is not unusual; different institutions are often better suited to organising different events. However, what particularly struck me was the positioning of these two programmes in relation to each other using words such as ‘satellite’ and ‘aligned’. ‘Satellite’ imagery (no pun intended) invokes ideas of the social dimensions events as separate, ‘tacked on’ and only peripherally connected to SBUK2018’s science programme. Whereas ‘alignment’ imagery invokes them as subordinate to the science programme. SBUK2018 was the place for discussing science, and the periphery was the place for discussing social science interests and public engagement.

For a community as reportedly vibrant and multidisciplinary as synthetic biology, this, to me, is problematic. Indeed, SBUK2018 declares itself a space for “a cohesive, vibrant and multidisciplinary community that is inclusive, open to innovation, collaboration and supportive of young talent”. The science programme’s RRI items notwithstanding, I was still left feeling it was primarily intended for scientists. This orientation is at best an own goal, and at worst a perpetuation of epistemic hierarchies within synthetic biology. Either way, it is a missed opportunity for the ‘premiere’ meeting in the UK to demonstrate how integrated synthetic biology can be.

Figure 2. Visual representation of SBUK2018 and Satellite Sessions

Upon reflection, this post could easily be interpreted as a pessimistic commentary on SBUK2018. Certainly, SBUK2018 did little to deliver on the promise of the “vibrant, cohesive and multidisciplinary community” I was hoping to experience as a social scientist. Equally certainly, the social science interests felt distinctly separate. However, mostly this just struck me as odd and not particularly reflective of the desire to integrate that I’ve seen within the synthetic biology community at Edinburgh. What emerges instead is an opportunity to learn from what didn’t work at SBUK2018, and for doing it better next year.

It is worth ending this post by noting that Balmer et al (2015) alert us to some potential characteristics of productive multidisciplinary collaborations that may prove useful. Two particularly pertinent ones include no one group having epistemic authority over the direction of the research, and social science interests not just being ‘tacked on’ (Balmer et al, 2015:16). For me, SBUK2018 failed in translating these characteristics to the conference space. Perhaps the organisers of SBUK2019 might consider these a little more robustly in planning next year’s event.

Before starting the Engineering Life project, Pablo Schyfter and I were part of Synthetic Aesthetics, which brought together synthetic biologists, social scientists, and artists and designers to think about their work in new ways. The other members of the project team were the synthetic biologists Drew Endy and Alistair Elfick, and the critical designer Daisy Ginsberg.

The five of us were recently provoked into writing an open letter to the Synthetic Biology Leadership Council, published on the Synthetic Aesthetics website. In it we point to the misrepresentation of our project in the new Strategic Plan for UK synthetic biology Biodesign for the Bioeconomy, which presents Synthetic Aesthetics as aiming to ‘beautify’ or ‘better communicate’ the science.

Although this is likely to have been an unintentional error, it does reflect a broadly-held assumption that this is the role for art and design in art/science collaborations. It is much easier to gloss the work in this way than to see it as critiquing and challenging dominant ways of imagining the future, which was one of the main objectives of the Synthetic Aesthetics project.

In our letter we also draw attention to a broader point that emerged from the project about the inseparability of values from design. This is particularly pertinent since the Strategic Plan calls for a move towards ‘biodesign’, but seems to assume that the only value that underlies this is commercialisation. We wrote about these issues, and many others, in our motley, interdisciplinary and multi-authored book Synthetic Aesthetics.

The point I want to make here, however, is that the both book and the letter to the Leadership Council were the result of collaborative thinking across disciplinary divides. Neither of them are critical interventions from disgruntled social scientists or external observers of the technology. Drew Endy and Alistair Elfick are leading figures in the synthetic biology community, and Daisy Ginsberg comes from the playful and subversive tradition of critical design. But what we found through working together is that we all shared a desire to broaden and diversify debates around synthetic biology, and to interrogate notions of ‘better’ design.

I am optimistic that these aims are shared by other scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanities scholars, artists, designers and civil society groups, and that together we might be able to challenge the narrow way in which synthetic biology is currently being framed in reports such as Biodesign for the Bioeconomy.

Well, it has been about a month since I returned from the iGEM Jamboree in Boston. Since its humble beginnings in 2004, the Jamboree has outgrown its original venue at MIT and for the past two years has been hosted at the Hynes Convention Center in downtown Boston. I’ve been involved with iGEM since 2008, when I first helped to advise the University of Edinburgh team. This is my third time attending the iGEM Jamboree as a Judge, and I’m always blown away by the enthusiasm of the students and how polished their presentations are.

iGEM from above at the 2015 Jamboree

The core reason for my involvement with the competition is because it encourages students to tackle issues outside the laboratory. ‘Human Practices’ has been an explicit part of iGEM since 2008. It is broadly defined as “the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work.” Teams are encouraged to consider any broader social, legal, ethical, philosophical, environmental, safety, justice, etc, aspects of their specific project or of synthetic biology more broadly. The Human Practices work pursued by teams often falls into one of the following categories:

• surveys designed to elicit views about synthetic biology and/or a proposed application,
• education and outreach activities designed to introduce iGEM and synthetic biology to broader audiences,
• engagement with stakeholders to help shape the design of their proposed product and the system it is intended to be used in.

Judges have typically rewarded the last approach more frequently than the former two – it’s easier to see what the students themselves are learning with this approach, and in the end there is greater possibility of designing a viable product that may actually benefit its intended user.

As with much of iGEM, the specific Human Practices requirements change over time – and have seen significant flux in the past couple of years. This year the Human Practices prize was split in two, with one prize available for ‘Best Integrated Design’ and another for ‘Best Education and Public Engagement’ project. One possible consequence of these more clearly defined prizes may be to narrow the types of projects teams pursue under Human Practices. Time will tell whether the ambition of winning a prize steers teams more towards integrated design and outreach than broader philosophical or legal investigations.

From an STS perspective, Human Practices could be seen as an experiment in whether and how reflexivity might be introduced into the biological engineering design process. I’m certainly not speaking on iGEM’s behalf with this statement – indeed, I’m not sure this is a core motivation driving their promotion of Human Practices. But from an STS vantage point it is an interesting case study to observe. Building reflexive practitioners in science and engineering seems to be a growing priority for funding councils, as seen for example with the rise of ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI) as a funding theme in European synthetic biology (and science & engineering more broadly).

So, does Human Practices work lead to the development of more reflexive iGEMers? This question clearly demands much more structured and systematic investigation than a weekend at iGEM. But I do have a couple of observations – and a question – that I’d like to advance in this blog post. A trend I noticed this year among teams competing for ‘Best Integrated Design’ was that their work was often geared towards seeking affirmation of their existing project or idea, rather than being a more open-ended investigation designed to make their projects stronger. Please note I’m not saying that all teams did this! But, for example, a common approach seemed to be to come up with an idea, and then to approach ‘the public’ (or a sub-section of the public with relevant interests) and ask in very broad terms whether they would like a solution to the general problem identified. Not surprisingly, the typical response to this was “yes, it would be great to have a solution to this problem.” Which was often interpreted by teams as a license to forge ahead with their project, and used during the team’s presentation as evidence of having consulted with stakeholders about their design.

The problem is, the devil is often in the detail. These broad questions can obscure the real challenges in engineering design. Sure, we’d all love to have solutions to problems we face in our daily lives and communities. But, what form these solutions take, how they work, who owns them, who pays for them, and how responsibilities and benefits are distributed, are far trickier questions – and ones with much deeper implications for the design of engineering solutions. Integrated design should be a more iterative and open-ended process. Asking whether there is general support for investing in solving a particular problem is fine, but it represents the very first step – the tip of the iceberg – in terms of actually designing a product and a system that might productively contribute to addressing the problem or need identified. It is not a validation of whatever device might then be developed.

What does all this mean in terms of promoting reflexivity? Reflexivity is not about searching for straightforward validation of one’s ideas. It is about cultivating a mindset of openness and inquiry about how to relate to the world. For iGEM teams, ideally it would be less about promoting a particular solution than about applying one’s talents in response to others’ needs – a mental shift that puts people first, not the technology. The competition format of iGEM encourages teams to present ‘successful’ designs, which doesn’t necessarily facilitate reflexivity. As was visible this year, integrated design was often equated with finding broad support for fixing a general problem. The authority and right to determine what form the solution would take rested firmly in the hands of the students, with little iteration or discussion with stakeholder groups about the specifics. A real practice of integrated design would likely involve students frequently discovering that their initial idea for a device will not work / not be taken up by their intended users / not find a viable market. How do we make this discovery ok to talk about and even celebrate – a step on the road to success, rather than failure in the compressed cycle of iGEM? And then how do we provide them with tools to creatively re-think and re-imagine what could work given their findings? These seem to me to be key challenges for the development of reflexive synthetic biologists.

So my parting question is this: is it a realistic ambition to think that a competition like iGEM can encourage the development of reflexive biological engineers? If so, how might this be fostered within the current competition framework? – acknowledging that it is already very structured and makes huge demands of its student teams. I’d welcome your thoughts on this!

Welcome to the Engineering Life blog! We are a group of researchers from the social sciences and the humanities studying the field of synthetic biology. You can read about the aims and objectives of the project here. In this blog, the project team will share some of our experiences and observations as we delve into the world of synthetic biology. But first, why synthetic biology? What’s distinctive about it? This was a question raised in a discussion panel at a meeting on synthetic biology in Helsinki that I attended recently, and although the panel didn’t answer it like this, I think the answer lay in the organisation of the meeting itself. Half the day was scientific talks and the other half of the day was talks by ‘others’, including a sociologist of science (me!), a historian of technology, a biohacker and a bioartist. Although this is not standard for synthetic biology meetings (and owes a lot to the meeting’s organiser Merja Penttilä), it is not exceptional either. Making sense of this “enlarged conversation” and who gets to be part of it is one of the objectives of the Engineering Life project. More on this, and other topics, soon…