Leader: Paul Rabinow

A key underlining premise of the SynBERC vision – to enable the rational design of valuable biological systems – is that the successful realization of such technical aims will require the reorganization of existing relations among and between engineering and the biosciences, the development of shared standards, and the fostering of an ethos of “open-source” biology. To this end, SynBERC’s research program has evolved as an increasingly comprehensive initiative that strongly connects technical objectives and innovations with broader opportunities and challenges in medicine, energy, the environment, and security. To that end, the Human Practices thrust critically links the engineering thrusts within a broad framework with attention to how economic, political, and cultural forces shape synthetic biology, and in turn how synthetic biology affects contemporary human welfare.

The Human Practices Thrust encompasses three interdependent research clusters. The first cluster, Biosecurity, is of central concern to all SynBERC investigators and is led jointly by Paul Rabinow (UCB), Kenneth Oye (MIT), and several other researchers within the engineering thrusts. The second research cluster, Ethics, is led by Paul Rabinow and centers on the goal of specifying how research programs and venues might be better designed and organized in view of the ethical near future. The third of the interdependent clusters, Infrastructure, is led by Kenneth Oye and focuses on standards and protocols for interoperability and performance, and ownership and sharing conventions.

Traditional approaches to interfacing the life sciences and human sciences have sought to anticipate how scientific developments will impact society, positioning human practices concerns external to, and downstream of, the biological scientific work per se. The expectations and habits of biologists and social scientists alike, as embodied by the Human Genome Project’s ELSI mode of cooperation, remain a source of blockage for true collaboration between “The Two Cultures” described by C.P. Snow in 1959. As such, sustained collaboration between bioscientists and human scientists has been rare. By contrast, the Human Practices Thrust has designed mixed teams of human scientists and other researchers to design models of collaboration and inquiry. Research activities are designed in a proactive mode of collaboration, intended to analyze and contribute to SynBERC’s overall directions as well as synthetic biology’s future. Despite persistent disciplinary and cultural challenges to collaboration, SynBERC’s inclusion of Human Practices within the center’s overall research portfolio remains promising. As research is adjusted in response to lessons learned, SynBERC’s experiment in collaboration could well provide a model for work in other centers.