References 397automatically praise every scientific development per se and a priori as great, but
asks how the technology could not only support the (economy) but actually
benefit people and the environment.
Learning from the lesson of the past, applying the RRI approach in SB is critical
to facilitate the social benefits of an emerging technology, to avoid raising social
resistance to a technological advance that does not benefit people, and to sup-
port trust in research and innovation. More activities to get the public involved
should be encouraged, while novel models should be built for open dialogues on
SB. One of our ongoing projects – SYNENERGENE – may provide such models
by setting up six platforms to tackle issues and challenges on SB of future of the
field, public science and participation, art, culture and society, research and pol-
icy, international dimension, and online communication. We also expect to see
more activities on turning SB into an RRI in the coming years.
Acknowledgments
Author acknowledges the financial support of the EC-FP7 Project ST-FLOW
(EC Grant No. 289326) and SYNENERGENE (EC Grant No. 321488) as well as
Project SYNMOD (FWF Grant No. I490-B12).
References
1 PCSBI (2010) New Directions: the Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging
Technologies, http://bioethics.gov/synthetic-biology-report.
2 Purnick, P.E. and Weiss, R. (2009) The second wave of synthetic biology: from
modules to systems. Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell Biol., 10 (6), 410–422.
3 IRGC (2008) Synthetic Biology: Risk and Opportunities of an Emerging Field,
http://www.synbiosafe.eu/uploads///pdf/IRGCConceptNote
SyntheticBiology_Final_30April.pdf (accessed 30 September 2017).
4 Schwille, P. (2011) Bottom-up synthetic biology: engineering in a tinkerer’s
world. Science, 333 (6047), 1252–1254.
5 Berg, P., Baltimore, D., Brenner, S., Roblin, R.O., and Singer, M.F. (1975)
Summary statement of the asilomar conference on recombinant DNA
molecules. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 72 , 1981–1984.
6 Keasling, J.D. (2008) Synthetic biology for synthetic chemistry. ACS Chem. Biol.,
3 (1), 64–76.
7 Juhas, M., Eberl, L., and Glass, J.I. (2011) Essence of life: essential genes of
minimal genomes. Trends Cell Biol., 21 (10), 562–568.
8 Luisi, P.L. (2007) Chemical aspects of synthetic biology. Chem. Biodivers., 4 (4),
603–621.
9 Murtas, G. (2007) Question 7: construction of a semi-synthetic minimal cell: a
model for early living cells. Origins Life Evol. Biosphere, 37 (4–5), 419–422.
10 Bedau, M.A., Parke, E.C., Tangen, U., and Hantsche-Tangen, B. (2009) Social and
ethical checkpoints for bottom-up synthetic biology, or protocells. Syst. Synth.
Biol., 3 (1–4), 65–75.