Whose Future? The Perils of Deliberative Democracy and Synthetic Biology

• In Event: Heterogeneity, Humility and Hegemony: Reflections on Engineering Life

Abstract

Synthetic biologists promise an excess of futures: in which pigs grow organs for human transplant, medicinal compounds are cultured in petri dishes rather than harvested in fields, meat is vegan, and science is 'democratized.' These visions are often presented as providing technical work-arounds to political conundrums.

STS provides a variety of tools for making sense of such scientific visions and diversifying decision-making processes around science and technology. The underlying political theory for this work is often based on deliberative democracy, an idealized model of decision-making in which debate is open to all affected, to engage in reasoned dialogue seeking mutual understanding. The goal is a rational, moral consensus. Forums seeking to determine how best to govern synthetic biology – international, national, and project-level – have tended to be structured around this vision of deliberation.

This version of democracy is failing synthetic biology. In this short paper, I point to on-going challenges in some key forums deliberating synthetic biology, and how the influence of deliberative democracy has played out in future-steeped debates. I consider the potential in basing such forums on a different model of democracy: agonism. If different visions of the future are explicitly acknowledged as embodying conflicting power relations, would this change how we debate current science?

Author

• Deborah Scott, University of Edinburgh