Since J. Craig Venter (Mr. Synthetic Biology) is presenting at a ‘sold out’ talk next Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at the Vogue Theatre (918 Granville St.) in Vancouver (Canada) as per my March 7, 2011 posting, I’ve become curious about how the topic is being discussed elsewhere.
Luckily, an April 14, 2011 posting at the Guardian Science blogs website by Ian Sample (How do synthetic biologists keep the support of the public?), provides some answers to my question.
In the piece, Sample is writing about an international gathering for a symposium on synthetic biology. It was a UK-US-Chinese meeting of the minds. David Willetts, UK science minister, gave the opening address. From the posting,
Willetts went on to raise the issue of public support for synthetic biology and the need to keep in mind the concerns that come up in discussion groups. He drew on a public dialogue report published last year (pdf here) that goes through some of these. To quote one passage he picked on from that document:
Enabling scientists to reflect on motivations was deemed very important. What is the purpose? Why are you doing it? What are you going to gain? What else will it do? How [do] you know you are right? These are five central questions at the heart of public concerns in this area. It should be incumbent on scientists to consider them.
“I think we can deal with these issues, but it’s very important we remain aware and sensitive to them,” he said.
I [Sample] asked Willetts whether government had learned anything from this country’s miserable experience with GM crops, an industry effectively crushed in the UK by lobby groups that appear to take an anticapitalist and antiglobalisation stance. Certainly the GM fiasco was fuelled by the view that many first generation crops would have benefited only those multinational companies trying to sell them.
With synthetic biology – a largely academic pursuit – the goals have clearer, more palatable goals: to produce green fuels or create new medicines. “The development of synthetic biology has so far avoided those mistakes,” Willetts said.
I am surprised by Willetts’ comments that synthetic biology goals are clearer, more palatable, and, seemingly, confined to green fuels and new medicine. It’s my impression that some much more grandiose claims are also being made for synthetic biology.
Back to Sample and this time he’s eliciting comments from Professor Zhao Guoping, director of the Synthetic Biology Lab Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, and one of the symposium participants,
I spoke to Prof Zhao about the kind of collaboration he’d like to see. “In China, synthetic biology is a developing science in a developing country,” he said. “International collaboration is very important to make [the field] develop quickly and efficiently, to transform it into an industry.” He sees the collaboration being one where intellectual property is shared among partners.
Zhao talked about the need for common international standards for the organic bits and pieces that synthetic biologists want to use as components in their products. But agreed standards for security and ethical issues surrounding synthetic biology are also desirable.
The potential dangers of synthetic biology are often raised and rarely underplayed in the media, but Prof Zhao sees this as a crucial matter for scientists to tackle head-on.
The cloning of Dolly the Sheep led to a ripple of fears that people were next, that long-dead tyrants might be replicated, Boys from Brazil-style, or that vaguely scary cult leaders might embark on their own experiments. There are more realistic concerns with synthetic biology, Zhao said.
“For cloning a human, practically we are talking a couple of centuries for that and it is relatively easy to control. But for synthetic biology, if I really want to work on a virus that can attack something I can go and do it,” Zhao said.
Interestingly, there’s no comment from a US participant and Sample does not mention the country in his final summary, which goes something along these lines: China is rapidly developing expertise in synthetic biology and Britain, initially slow to get started, is now catching up and focused on developing a synthetic biology research sector. Together, China and Britain will be a strong collaborative team.
Getting back to the Venter talk in Vancouver next week, I was impressed when the show was fully subscribed two weeks before the talk. Yes, the seats are free but the Vogue was a movie house built in the 1940s so it’s big. According to this Wikipedia essay, it has 1,144 seats to fill. Quite an accomplishment for a topic few people here know much about.