Synthetic Biology has again found its way onto the
Today programme. The prompt this time is an
admirable report (pdf) from bioscience funders the
BBSRC, who asked social scientists Paul Martin and Andrew Balmer to map the social and ethical questions raised by this increasingly frenetic science. But the BBC's report is inevitably framed by Craig Venter, the energetic and unapologetic face of all things synthetic.
Six months ago,
when we hosted Craig Venter, I was convinced that the UK had a unique role to play in this debate, following our nano lead. The BBSRC's intervention, emerging from their innovative Bioscience for Society panel, is a first step.
Last week I chaired
a synthetic biology discussion at the Dana Centre featuring science writer
Philip Ball, Chris Langley from Scientists for Global Responsibility and
George Attard, who despite claiming he isn't, is a founder member of the UK's emerging Synthetic Biology community. We also had
Christina Smolke skyped in from her sunny lab at Caltech.
I hubristically branded our discussion the first UK public debate on Synthetic Biology , but it become rapidly apparent that a large proporation of our full-house 'public' were in fact young scientists, spilling out from Imperial College up the road, involved in or excited by this emerging area. The fact that they wanted to spend an evening reflecting on the bigger questions around their work seemed to me to be an early indicator of the UK's valuable offer to the emergence of Syn Bio.
George Attard closed our event by reflecting that the audience "were willing to trust scientists, but didn't believe that scientists should have the final world." it seems that even its practitioners think that synthetic biology is too important to be left to synthetic biologists.