Synthetic Society
Overview
The MIT / Boston-area Synthetic Society Working Group (SSWG) is an ad hoc collection of individuals who are working to directly address societal issues embedded and surrounding the emerging field of synthetic biology. Everybody is welcome to participate either via contributions to the pages hosted on this wiki or by visiting Boston for a meeting. At MIT, participants include scientists and engineers engaged in synthetic biology research and scholars expert in considering societal issues associated with emerging technologies. The primary goal of the SSWG is to make unbiased progress on the issues. A secondary goal of the SSWG is to collect and organize resources in order to faciliate widespread understanding and consideration of the issues.
Background
What is synthetic biolology? The limited, working definition of synthetic biology that we are using in our discussions is (i) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems and (ii) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes. That is, we are now primarily interested in considering the impact of new, engineered biological systems that are encoded via standard four-base DNA (that is, A, T, C, G). This "definition" leaves out certain aspects of synthetic biology research (for example, understanding the origins of life by re-creating a cell from raw chemicals in the lab). Two reasons encourage the use of a focused definition. First, we believe that the direct engineering of living systems via standard DNA will have the widest societal impact over the near term. Second, we are likely already at risk of trying to do too much.
What issues are you considering? We are considering four classes of issues: (i) Biological Risks and Security, (ii) Understanding and Perception, (iii) Ownership, Sharing, and Innovation, and (iv) Community Organization and Culture. Each of these issues is introduced in detail below. If there's an additional class that you think should be considered please let us know.
