18.4 Tooard Responsible Research and Innovation RRII)in Synthetic Biology 391In RRI the importance to engage all stakeholders, including the public, was
emphasized [71]. By engaging all the social actors, it will help to build up public
acceptance of innovation, to fulfill the government’s responsibility to give citi-
zens opportunity to express their opinions, and to make sure public and civil
society stakeholders are also co-players of research and innovation. The broad-
spectrum public engagement would make research and innovation more effec-
tive. The matured public perception on the technology will be important for
future applications SB will develop. The advances of SB might make the knowl-
edge and technology available to the amateur scientists, making them possible
co-contributors. How to get the public involved is still a challenge, and the policy
makers need to find solutions to make public involvement efficient and to assist
the public to form their opinion. Developing proper models of SB to engage the
societal actors should learn from the experience obtained from those of GE,
nanotechnology, and IT (models of conflict, progress, and gadget). In an opinion
paper by Nerlich and Mcleod, they argued that raising awareness on SB should
be responsibly, in short, raising awareness of SB by responsible communication
while comparing to the case study on climate change, the awareness of which
should be advocated responsibly [72].
18.4.2 Gender Equality
Gender equality is the second key issues for building the RRI framework. In
the latest report from the EC on structural changes in research institutes,
integrating a gender perspective has been considered as one of the key solu-
tion to improve research in the EU [73]. Promoting gender equality in all levels
contributes to research excellence and efficiency by making full use of a wider
talent pool of human resource. The report brought up gender equality strategy
(key steps) for actors at the EU, national and regional level, as well as to
gatekeepers of scientific excellence and to universities and scientific institutes.
For example, the EC should make gender requirements to all funding pro-
grams; dedicated programs should be created to promote structural changes in
research institutes; EU should set a good model at the worldwide level regard-
ing gender issues; special unit for gender issues should be reestablished; a
high-quality leadership development program should be created targeting
experts; and researcher mobility measurement should incorporate gender
dimension.
Gender issues have already been studied by the SB society. The Sybhel project
has studied how SB might influence the philosophical concepts of human health,
which also involved gender aspects, and analyzed gender issues related to SB
techniques in one of its work packages [74]. The ESRC Genomics Policy and
Forum at the University of Edinburgh run a public engagement program on SB.
A Democs card game on SB was designed, and playing Democs game was used
as a resource to explore the public engagement of SB with lay publics in Scotland.
In their report, the gender of the participants was analyzed in the feedback of
the game [75]. However, neither these reports provided a comprehensive under-
standing of the gender issues in SB. Thus dedicated projects are needed to
address these issues.