Can a new model help governance keep up with synthetic biology?

Synthetic biology is moving at a rapid pace, and regulations will need to keep up to allow useful technologies to hit the market while maintaining a high standard of safety. Since most policymakers are not experts in all of the newest synthetic biology technologies, better analysis tools are needed to understand how to react. So two researchers, Christopher Cummings and Jennifer Kuzma, from North Carolina State University and Nanyang Technological University built a model to determine how to prepare for handling the regulation new synthetic biology products.

Building a model for governing new synbio technology

This model for assessing risks of new synthetic biology technologies is called Societal Risk Evaluation Scheme (SRES) and it tries to make governance more anticipatory than just reactive. This is a tough problem. How do we predict the risks of technologies that don’t exist yet? How do we assess products that seem totally new? The field of synthetic biology is pushing the boundaries of what we can do with and to biology.

To create the model the researchers...