Rhetorics and practices of democratization in synthetic biology

Synthetic biology is an emerging sphere of practice concerned with trying to make biology easier, cheaper and more reliable to engineer. ¹ Engineering is a key source of inspiration for this young and growing field – engineering principles and practices like standardization, modularization, and abstraction are being promoted as useful for ‘building with biology’, in much the same way as they facilitate the building of useful, reliable systems and artifacts out of non-biological materials. Early proponents of synthetic biology hope that the rigorous, systematic approach of engineering will succeed where they suggest traditional biotechnology and molecular biology have so far failed to deliver (Endy, 2005). Central preoccupations for synthetic biologists include managing the complexity of biology (a term practitioners often refer to as ‘black-boxing’ complexity), and developing principles or rules for designing robust, predictable, and scalable genetic ‘circuits’ out of smaller genetic components (Adrianantoandro, et al., 2006; Purnick and Weiss, 2009).