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Synthetic biology may be an important source of progress as well as societal and political conflict. Against this backdrop, several technology assessment organizations have been seeking to contribute to timely societal and political opinion-making on synthetic biology. The Rathenau Instituut, based in the Netherlands, is one of these organizations. In 2011, the institute organized a 'Meeting of Young Minds': a young people's debate between 'future synthetic biologists' and 'future politicians'. The former were represented by participants in the international Genetically Engineered Machines competition (iGEM), the latter by political youth organizations (PYOs) linked to Dutch political parties. The Rathenau Instituut found seven PYOs—including right wing, left wing, Green and Christian groups—willing to commit to an intensive process aimed at formulating a tentative partisan view on synthetic biology and discussing it with fellow PYOs and iGEM participants. Given the minimal amount of available data on how political parties understand synthetic biology, mapping the debate may provide valuable insights. In this article, I aim to provide such a mapping exercise and also to reflect on how and why the Rathenau Instituut organized the event.

Policymakers require stable anchor points for long-term policies. The governance of new technologies can be fraught with difficulties in terms of public acceptance. Strong ethical foundations can help align stakeholder interests. In democracies, such anchor points and ethical foundations can be provided through constitutional values. The main aim of this chapter is to show how European fundamental values are relevant in the governance of science and technology.

The discourse on the fundamental issues raised by synthetic biology, such as biosafety and biosecurity, intellectual property, environmental consequences and ethical and societal implications, is still open and controversial. This, coupled with the potential and risks the field holds, makes it one of the hottest topics in technology assessment today. How a new (bio)technology is perceived by the public influences the manner in which its products and applications will be received. Therefore, it is important to learn how people perceive synthetic biology. This work gathers, integrates and discusses the results of three studies of public perceptions of synthetic biology: (1) an analysis of existing research on how media portray synthetic biology across 13 European countries and in the USA, (2) the Meeting of Young Minds, a public debate between prospective politicians and synthetic biologists in the Netherlands and (3) the experiences of citizen panels and focus groups in Austria, the UK and the USA. The results show that the media are generally positive in their reports on synthetic biology, rather unbalanced in their view of potential benefits (emphasized) and risks (downplayed), and also heavily influenced by the sources of the stories, namely scientists and stakeholders. Among the prospective Dutch politicians, there were positive expectations as well as very negative ones. Some of these positions are also shared by participants in public dialogue experiments, such as not only the demand for information, transparency and regulation but also a sense of resignation and ineluctability of scientific and technological progress.

This chapter consists of a comparative analysis of emerging debates on synthetic biology in the European Union, China and India. After briefly introducing synthetic biology as a new and emerging science, it maps and compares the emerging debates on synthetic biology in the three regions, focusing on a number of different discourses respectively relating to innovation, risk, and power and control. In addition, the chapter discusses and analyses the role of public and ethics debates as crosscutting and reflective discourses. It considers how these discourses have evolved, what the dominant themes and issues are, which actors are involved and how the discourses have been informed by the value systems and socioeconomic development in the three regions. In conclusion the governance challenges resulting from these discourses are considered.

Nanotechnology has provided a new window of opportunity to reframe state-science-society relationships. In particular the notion of upstream public engagement has been put forward. But while public engagement is seen as indispensable in the governance of science and technology (S&T) there still is a need to reflect on why, how, for who and by whom public engagement has to be organised. This paper describes a wide range of activities that were organised in the Netherlands to bring a public perspective into the development of nanotechnology. Our study shows that in order to better understand the complexities of the governance of science and technology, a new research perspective is needed. By reflecting on the relationship between informing and engaging, on the interaction between engagement processes within the societal, scientific and political sphere, and on organisational and institutional constraints, we present an outline of such a new research perspective. As well, we identify key themes for comparative research in governance of S&T within different countries.