The Construction of Imaginaries of the Public as a Threat to Synthetic Biology
By C. Marris. 2015
126 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Scientific institutions and innovation-focused government bodies have identified public attitudes to synthetic biology as an obstruction to the field. This view is based on a perception that the public is (or will likely become) fearful of synthetic biology and that a ‘public scare’ would impede development of the field. Fear of the public's fear of synthetic biology, which I characterise as ‘synbiophobia-phobia’, has been the driving force behind the promotion of public engagement and other activities to address ‘ethical, legal and social issues' (ELSI). These activities have been problematic in two ways. Firstly, they are based on the discredited ‘deficit-model’ understanding of public responses to science, in which negative public attitudes towards science are thought to result from a lack of scientific knowledge. Secondly, they have taken for granted sociotechnical expectations put forward by scientific institutions. These promises of the field, and the tacit normative commitments embedded within them, have not been opened up to public appraisal. In these ways, synthetic biology exemplifies many phenomena described by Welsh and Wynne (2013). This article analyses the ontological stakes in the work conducted by scientific institutions to conjure up imaginaries of publics with respect to synthetic biology. As synthetic biology emerges as a field of hope under threat from publics, how have science, publics and the relations between them become defined?
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular Biology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b826a7232598af7f3971b46ac9db3a7ed8ac01d
Citations in the corpus
- Taking roles in interdisciplinary collaborations (2015, unknown): “In UK synthetic biology in particular, the “GM debate” was a forceful repertoire, with concerns regularly expressed by research funders and scientists that synthetic biology could become the “next GM”, and that the involvement of social scientists would help to prevent this (Marris, 2015).”
- Exploring the normative turn in regional innovation policy: responsibility and the quest for public value (2019, unknown): “As these technological developments carry with them a great deal of scientific uncertainty and typically a widespread ‘fear’ by innovators of potential public unrest and lack of acceptability (Marris, 2015),”