London

10 impressions from SB 6.0

1.      Maria Mercedes Roca’s talk was the emotional highlight of the conference. She put an emphasis on the need for modern biology with respect to the idea of sustainable industrial agriculture. Moreover, she presented the asymmetry of regulatory power between industrialized and developing countries.

2.      The session on responsible research and innovation, chaired by Claire Marris was mainly attended by social scientists. It was a parallel session in the Huxley building that started out with defining the term. To foster scientists’ positive attitude towards such a framework, it would be necessary to have such a session in the main auditorium.

3.      Some scientists complained that there were too many talks about ethical, social or regulatory issues or about future possibilities compared to actual scientific state-of-the-art talks.

4.      Apart from Maria Mercedes Roca’s talk and the appearance of an open letter outside the conference, there was a general lack of criticism, controversy and diversity of opinions as regards the social embedding of synthetic biology, its future visions and the aspect of a possible bioeconomy.

5.      The general atmosphere for meeting people (breaks, poster sessions, conference dinner) were nice but could be improved in some aspects. Especially the conference dinner offered not much against group segregation (social scientist-table, biobricks-table, etc.) There could be a setting with randomized table cards to foster communication with people you had never met before.

6.      Sometimes the conference setting was too much of a one-way communication event with not enough interactive elements. There could have been threads with workshops on one of the three days.

7.      The field seems to have grown together in some respects but a struggle for standards is still at an early stage. However, the diversity of the SB community is something very unique. Engineers, biologists, social scientists, philosophers, computer specialists, chemical engineers, biophysicists and so forth are the audience of the conference: More than 750 delegates and speakers from 44 countries all over the world.

8.      The set-up of the poster sessions gave certain advantages to presenters with lower numbers, because their posters were hanging in the Queen’s Tower room, where coffee and lunch breaks were held.

9.      The deficit model of science communication is still pretty much in the heads of the actors at SB 6.0 although also diverse statements against it (e.g. the frightening power of the confirmation bias) were heard.

10.  A still predominant motive is the fear of the GMO-ghost, uniting the rows of scientists but not so much some of the other actors in the field. Still some pose the question: What can the SB community do better, while others declare that the diversity of participants at SB conferences and projects is already something that discerns SB from the problematic approaches in times of genetic engineering.