(Re‐)Designing Nature? An Overview and Outlook on the Ethical and Societal Challenges in Synthetic Biology

Abstract

to provide an initial systematization of the ethical and socio-scientific debate on SB by structuring and categorizing issues that have been widely discussed and debated in recent years. The investigation included international ethical and societal research on SB, covering the period from January 2010 to December 2017. Even though we are aware that there have been several developments before it was referred to as SB, [6] this sample period was selected as the experiments of Craig Venter and his team in the year 2010 marked the birth of broader public and scientific attention to SB, as well as the rise and further establishment of SB as a distinct research discipline.We predefined five main fields of ethical research in order to map the scope of the respective debates. These fields were based on theoretical presuppositions informed by our preliminary theoretical and empirical research and the resulting experiences within the field of ethical and societal challenges of SB. The five fields are: 1) the definition and scope of possible applications; 2) questions of biosafety and -security; 3) the impact of SB on taken-for-granted cultural perceptions and values; 4) SB as a new mode of public participation in science; 5) issues of sustainable governance and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). With these five fields in mind, we searched for relevant articles on Scopus and PubMed. These are two of the largest international research databases, which cover a broad spectrum of ethical and socio-scientific work within the context of biotechnologies. The selected search term was "synthetic biology" in combination with several distinctive codes, which can be assigned to the aforementioned predefined main fields of ethical research ( Table 1).In general, our literature analysis has several methodological limitations. As it is not a comprehensive systematic literature review, it does not provide a broad set of quantitative data scrutinizing all debates, issues and questions on the ethical and societal challenges in SB. Nevertheless, our analysis provides a structured overview on and an initial systematization of the most relevant topics within the discussion on SB in recent years. Additionally, this article aims to provide an analysis and discussion of the current state of play of ethical and societal issues in SB.The first section is concerned with the question of a possible definition of SB and the issue of how we could describe and analyze its technological progress with regard to ethical and societal challenges. As one frequent debate of the last few This structured literature analysis aims to map the current, emerging, and predicted future of synthetic biology (SB) by putting the focus on the implied conceptual, societal, and ethical challenges. The central objective of the analysis is to provide an initial systematization of the ethical and socio-scientific debate on SB by structuring and categorizing widely discussed issues within the debate in recent years. Starting with the quest for possible definitions, issues ...

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