Synthetic biologists design and engineer organisms for a better and more sustainable future. While the manifold prospects are encouraging, concerns about the uncertain risks of genome editing affect public opinion as well as local regulations. As a consequence, biosafety and associated concepts, such as the Safe-by-design framework and genetic safeguard technologies, have gained notoriety and occupy a central position in the conversation about genetically modified organisms. Yet, as regulatory interest and academic research in genetic safeguard technologies advance, the implementation in (...) industrial biotechnology, a sector that is already employing engineered microorganisms, lags behind. The main goal of this work is to explore the utilization of genetic safeguard technologies for designing biosafety in industrial biotechnology. Based on our results, we posit that biosafety is a case of a changing value, by means of further specification of how to realize biosafety. Our investigation is inspired by the Value Sensitive Design framework, to investigate scientific and technological choices in their appropriate social context. Our findings discuss stakeholder norms for biosafety, reasonings about genetic safeguards, and how these impact the practice of designing for biosafety. We show that tensions between stakeholders occur at the level of norms, and that prior stakeholder alignment is crucial for value specification to happen in practice. Finally, we elaborate in different reasonings about genetic safeguards for biosafety and conclude that, in absence of a common multi-stakeholder effort, the differences in informal biosafety norms and the disparity in biosafety thinking could end up leading to design requirements for compliance instead of for safety. (shrink)

The values that will govern choices among future energy systems are unlikely to be the same as the values we embrace today. This paper discusses principles of rational choice for agents expecting future value shifts. How do we ought to reason if we believe that some values are likely to change in the future? Are future values more, equally, or less important than present ones? To answer this question, I propose and discuss the Expected Center of Gravity Principle, which articulates (...) what I believe to be a reasonable compromise between present and future values. (shrink)

As policy innovation is essential for upscaling responsible innovation, understanding its relationship to value change(s) occurring or sought in sociotechnical systems is imperative. In this study, we ask: what are the different types of values in the policy process? And, how does value change influence policy innovation? We propose a disaggregation of values and value change based on a four-stream variant of the multiple streams framework (MSF), a conceptual lens increasingly used for explaining policy innovation in sociotechnical transitions. Specifically, we (...) posit that the values that ‘govern’ problem framing, policy design, political decision making, and technological diffusion can evolve relatively independently, potentially leading to value conflict. We apply this framework to the ongoing case of the market-based economic dispatch of electricity (MBED) policy in the Indian energy transition using content analysis. We find that the MBED scheme—with its emphasis on efficiency (problem), economic principles (policy), low-cost dispatch (technology), and centralization (politics)—attempts value change in each stream. Each instance of value change is, however, widely contested, with the ensuing value conflicts resulting in significant opposition to this policy innovation. We conclude that a disaggregation of values based on the MSF can facilitate an analysis of value change and value conflict in sociotechnical transitions and lay the foundation for systematically studying the relationships among technological change, value change, and policy change. (shrink)