ARIA’s Synthetic Plants Programme as a Site for Experimental Governance and Responsible Innovation
Overview
In this talk, I want to do two things. First, I’d like to introduce you to the ARIA Synthetic Plants programme and explain our role within it. ARIA - the Advanced Research and Invention Agency - is a new funder in the UK, apparently modelled on DARPA, and with a mission to funder researchers “working at the edge of the possible”. The Synthetic Plants programme is funding a cadre of scientists who aim to create plant synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts in 3 years. The first focus is the potato, but many other plants remain in sight. One of two social scientific teams investigating the social and ethical dimensions of plant synthetic genomics, we focus particularly on using interdisciplinary collaboration as a form of governance and prompting public discussion. In describing this situation, I want to draw particular attention to the fact that this is a techno-utopian, promissory and extremely enthusiastic plant synthetic biology programme. This leads me to ask, what space is there for responsible innovation within it?
My second goal is to introduce some of the early findings from our empirical work and ask you to make sense of them with me. Centred around a phrase, the ‘more-than-technical’, we have begun cataloguing some of the diverse visions, hopes, issues, commitments and alternatives circulating in the programme. Our hope is that we can use this initial cataloguing to design collaborative spaces to stop and think about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and whether other approaches might be possible. I’ll introduce two or three prototype collaborations and seek to open up conversation with you about how we might develop or remix them.
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About Robert Smith
Robert Smith is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research examines the social, political, and policy dimensions of biological engineering, particularly the ways in which they are made and governed. He is currently examining attempts to engineer life at the ‘genome scale’ and the role of research funding organisations as a site for democratically governing science.
He is PI on the ARIA-funded project, Cultivating Responsible Innovation in Plant Synthetic Genomics, CoI on the UKRI Advanced Therapeutics Engineering Biology Hub, and CoI on NSF Global Center for Reliable and Scalable Biofoundries for Biomanufacturing and Global Bioeconomy, led by the University of Illinois.
Rob also leads a collaborative project with the Research Council of Norway to develop new processes for responsible innovation in two European Partnership Funding Programmes (in materials science and health research), and is RRI advisor to the UKRI Environmental Biotechnology Innovation Centre, and co-leads the EPSRC/BBSRC Environmental Biotechnology Network’s Social Science Working Group. He is a coordinator of the Edinburgh Hub for Responsible Innovation and the university’s representative to the Public Interest Technology University Network.
For more info, see https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/robert-smith
