DEMOS

Demos has this morning hosted a round table with Craig Venter, controversial human genome projecteer and now spearhead of the next Next Big Thing: Synthetic Biology (or Synthetic Genomics if you prefer). Venter was engagingly open about the possibilities and pitfalls of Syn Bio, which promises to combine engineering with biology to design new lifeforms. He pointed to the possibilities of energy and fuel generation from new organisms and warned us that, if an innovative Siberian happened upon permafrosted smallpox victim from the 19th century and bought a DNA sythnesiser from Ebay (apparently it's possible), he could cause all sorts of trouble.

Much of the discussion turned on questions of governance, regulation and what would be governable. Are we kidding ourselves if we think that we can control these new technologies? Should we just encourage people to be as open as possible and hope for the best? The UK policymakers, who have learned various tough lessons in the last few years, said that they need to do "a lot of listening" to the public, rather than just  "a lot of explaining." Venter himself has been more bullish. He has been a part of useful attempts to explore the ethics and governance of Syn Bio. But these questions are still wide open.

As well as the what of science, with all of its baggage of risk and benefit, there are questions of the how of science. Will Syn Bio become another centralised effort that crystallises narrow social interest and intellectual property, or is the promise of "open source biology" a realistic one? And that's before we've even begun with the why. Demos will certainly be looking at this in more depth over the coming months. We owe huge thanks to Craig Venter for taking time out of a hectic UK tour to set this ball rolling...