Synbio is a diverse field with diverse applications, and the different contexts (e.g., gain-of-function research, biofuels) raise different ethical and governance challenges. The objective of this course is to increase learners’ awareness and understanding of ethical and policy/governance issues that arise in the design, conduct and application of synthetic biology. The course will begin with a short history of recombinant DNA technology and how governance of that science developed and evolved, and progress through a series of areas of application of synbio. Content will be presented in many forms, including not only reading and lectures, but also recorded and live interviews and discussions with scientists, ethicists and policy makers. Learners will have the opportunity to think, write and talk about the issues and challenges in their own work and in real-life case examples. A final project will engage students in the development of governance models for synbio.
Public Engagement
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From the course by Johns Hopkins University
Engineering Life: Synbio, Bioethics & Public Policy
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From the lesson
Governance
In the final week of the course, we will talk about both models of governance for emerging biotechnologies and the role of public engagement in the development and oversight of the science. The work of the week includes lecture videos, one outside video, and readings, as well as interviews with LeRoy Walters and Jane Calvert. The final course project builds on the Week 2 and 4 peer-assessed projects, and goes a step further, asking you to develop and defend a decision-making process for a government policy related to the release of genetically modified mosquitoes.
Meet the Instructors
Debra JH Mathews, PhD, MAAssistant Director for Science Programs
Berman Institute of Bioethics
[MUSIC]
In this video, we're going to talk about public engagement.
We're going to talk about considerations, things you need to
take into account when contemplating doing public engagement,
a few models and examples of public engagement activities,
and then talk about a few challenges related to it.
So some of the things you need to think about when contemplating
public engagement include the stage at which you want to engage folks
in the research process or the product development, et cetera.
What is the nature of that engagement or the involvement of the public going to be?
Then how integrated, or not, the people involved,
the people you're engaging are in the decision-making process itself.
With regard to this stage of involvement,
are you talking about engaging folks around, like very early in the process?
Around identifying what questions you should be asking in a particular
research program or for a grant proposal, for example.
Are you talking about engaging folks around research design?
Developing what are the goals of this research so
that you can figure out how best to design the research or
the technology to address the goals that you find are of interest to the public.
Is it around funding determinations or funding priorities?
Is it at the point of publication?
You're sharing your research with the world, and want to engage the public
around, sort of, applications of that research, for example.
Or is it at the point much later in the process of product or
application development?
And you want to engage with the public around what are appropriate applications
of a new scientific discovery, for example.
With regard to the nature of the involvement
of the public you are talking with, Gastil,
in a chapter in public engagement in emerging technologies,
talks about the role of public engagement in either identifying,
framing, analyzing or resolving a debate.
So there are different sort of roles in the debate that public engagement
activity might have.
And additional considerations include this sort of series of questions
about public engagement or engagement activities.
So, first of all, with whom are you going to engage, right?
Who is that public?
And this will come up as a challenge later, as well.
Or who are the publics?
What does it mean when you're engaging with the public?
Who exactly is that?
That can be pretty difficult to figure out.
And it can vary depending on
the research or application you're talking about, right?
There will be different stakeholders.
Different people who stand to benefit or bear the burden.
So, in fact, the publics, or the public,
might be different in different engagement activities.
What is the goal of public engagement?
This relates to the role, the different roles that Gastil pointed out,
identifying a problem or resolving in debate, for example.
Is your goal with this excercise to do sort of landscaping?
Sort of put the information about the researcher application out there and
sort of get a sense of how different members of the public or
different stakeholders view that research or view that application.
Are you trying to generate and facilitate debate?
There's a topic that you think is an issue and
you want to get people really talking about it.
And a public engagement exercise might be a way to do that.
Are you trying to build consensus around, for example,
appropriate uses of a new technology?
Or are you, in fact, looking for a decision, or a judgement,
an actual policy statement about what happened?
There are also questions about, what is the product of an engagement exercise?
I mean, it's going to be related to what is the role, or what is the goal?
But what does that product look like?
Is it the process itself?
So, the act of engaging the public in debate is, in fact, the product?
Is it a statement that comes out of that group?
For example, a consensus statement?
Is it some kind of polling data?
Is it an ongoing process or
involvement in a decision-making process?
How, we're very related to that,
how does that product feed into the decision-making process?
Is it, in fact, very closely integrated or is it report
on public views that goes to the folks who are, in fact, making the decision?
How is, again, the product from that engagement process actually feeding into
any decision making process?
And then, finally, what does successful engagement look like?
How do you know that you have achieved your goal
with a particular public engagement exercise?
Now I'm going to talk about some models and
examples of public engagement, in particular in synthetic biology.
So you can go everything from sort of very simple online polling, right?
You're going to get the folks who care most about it responding to that.
Or it could be a more sophisticated kind of polling like
deliberation that happens, followed by polling.
So it's a more informed and engaged kind of polling exercise.
You could use online forums.
So an example of this is, SYNBIOSAFE in 2008, did an online
conference in an effort to really stimulate debate around synthetic biology.
It had over a hundred participants from over 20 countries and
out of this they sort of developed a landscaping abuse
around synthetic biology, particular topics within synthetic biology.
Citizen juries are another model of public engagement.
And juries are probably the public deliberative body with which many of us
are most familiar.
I, certainly, have sat on juries and it is, in fact, a deliberative process.
It is responsive to, supposed to be responsive to the facts in front of you,
and you're supposed to issue a considered
judgment based on what you know about a case.
Public consultation or public dialogues.
An example of this took place in 2009 and
2010, run by the BBSRC and EPSRC in the UK.
So these are the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and
the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
And there aim with this dialogue was to allow, in their words,
the diverse perspectives of a range of UK residents to be articulated clearly,
and in public, in order that future policies can better reflect these views,
concerns, and aspirations.
And they did this public dialogue through a series of workshops held throughout
the UK, and a couple dozen interviews, several dozen interviews as well.
Deliberative democracy is an approach to public
engagement that is quite popular right now.
And deliberative democracy is a school of thought in political theory that claims
that political decisions should be the product of fair and
reasonable discussion in debate amongst citizens.
And in the context of public engagement,
it's really about getting diverse citizens together to learn about,
discuss and consider an issue in depth before coming to a decision,
or a view on, for example, a field, such as synthetic biology or
a technology or application of that science.
Consensus conferences are also a form or a model of public
engagement that is, again, getting diverse citizens together and
trying to build consensus about an approach or a best step forward.
And, again, as with governance,
with public engagement one size is not going to fit all.
It depends, again, on the details of the technology.
It depends on the basis for the mora disagreement surrounding or
raised by any particular or the given technology.
There will here, as well, be existing constraints with regard to governance and
regulatory constraints, like how can a process like
this actually feed into the way that the decision making process or
the policy making process is currently structured?
There will be different distribution of risks and benefits.
And all of those considerations we had before are also variables, right?
So different goals, your different roles.
For example, you wouldn’t have the same kind of public engagement activity
if you're looking to landscape views, as compared to you're looking for
a decision about funding priorities, for example.
Then, finally, what are some of the challenges?
I mean, you will have caught on to some of these already, right?
Who is the public, or who are the publics that you're supposed
to talk to when you're trying to get feedback, design research,
assess abuse about a particular area of research or application?
There are cultural differences, right?
In diverse societies, you have a whole range of views.
And people that are coming to the conversation with very different
commitments, different values, different
sort of cultural orientations, different approaches to problems.
And getting diverse groups of people to
have constructive conversations with each other can be quite difficult.
In particular, when you're talking about morally contested areas of science and
technology.
Right?
It's hard to have civil
debate in which we can be swayed around really
morally contested issues or many, certainly, many morally contested issues.
And then what does the sort of legitimacy of that process
look like to folks who aren't involved?
Some of these engagement exercises include 20 or 30 people.
I mean those folks were selected to be representative.
But how legitimate is that process going to look to the broader group of folks?
Even if you have a couple of hundred people, to the many thousands of people,
or tens of thousands of people who weren't involved in that process,
how legitimate does that process look to them?
So, we certainly haven't figured out, by any stretch of
the imagination, how best to sort of do public engagement.
It's still very much up for debate.
And an area of active work.
But the value of the engagement is clear, and
it's a duty of all scientists to make efforts to engage
the public in conversations about the work they do.
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