The 2012 Strategic Action Plans
The first class of twenty LEAP Fellows developed thirteen co-authored white papers describing their vision and plans in development. Topics included educational models, risk research funding, global health approaches, standards development, and much more. Many LEAP Fellows have already begun implementing and refining their plans. We’ve helped catalyze new courses and workshops, engaged with funding and policy leaders, and much more.
Topics Included
Education and Community | Organization and Collaboration | Governance and Responsibility | Risk Research and Practice | Standards and Sharing | Identifying Needs
Education and Community
Enhancing Undergraduate Education to Drive Responsible Growth of the Bioeconomy
Marc Facciotti
The US bioeconomy generated an estimated $300 billion of revenue in 2011. Advances in foundational technologies, such as synthetic biology, are lowering barriers to biotechnology, enabling a growing number of people to participate. Technological advances and the democratization of biotechnology present opportunities for economic growth, particularly in areas like small-scale, distributed biomanufacturing. In addition to growth, technical advances springing from the bioeconomy also present great hope for reducing the severity of some of our nation’s most pressing financial challenges, particularly those related to the increasing costs of healthcare delivery and energy. These opportunities challenge educational institutions to enhance training programs, foster innovation and entrepreneurship, and to promote the responsible/ethical use of biotechnology. We identify new opportunities for research universities to help drive growth in the bioeconomy, highlight existing efforts and propose new opportunities, and describe some of the associated “boots-on-the-ground” challenges that must be addressed before widespread implementation can succeed.
Worldwide Network of Community Labs
Ellen Jorgensen
Community biolabs are a natural environment for thoughtful examination and discussion of the implications and ethics surrounding cutting-edge DNA-based technologies. Creating a network of such spaces could have a profound effect at the grassroots level on both science education and the public perception of synthetic biology. Organizations such as Genspace have demonstrated that reframing the synthetic biology laboratory facility as a neighborhood resource can demystify and democratize biotechnology, allowing it to have a more open relationship with the eventual end user. Here, anyone can become an innovator or inspire others through peer-to-peer teaching. Community labs supplement existing educational programs and encourage the next generation of young researchers by providing hands-on lab training and mentoring. Identifying and distributing best practices for community lab startup and making them freely available would accelerate the development of a network of these resources both nationwide and worldwide.
Organization and Collaboration
Love Our Monsters - Radical Collaboration in a Post-Disciplinary Age
Christina Agapakis
Over the past decade, synthetic biology has disciplined itself. Synthetic biology aims to make biotechnology a “true engineering discipline,” through the application and adoption of engineering design principles. As biology and engineering have merged in synthetic biology, the blurring of the boundary between science and technology has created a new discipline, complete with its own boundaries and its own discursive methods for creating, reinforcing, and enforcing those boundaries. While these boundaries serve to define useful goals and productive challenges for the field, the applied research of synthetic biology often benefits from the input of many more disciplines, fields that remain as outsiders even in the dynamic and interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology. This strategic plan describes how recent partnerships between synthetic biology and art, bioethics, policy, and law show the potential for a new model of post-disciplinary research, one where biological designs are conceived and deployed through active collaboration to create technology that functions effectively, safety, sustainability at the human scale.
International Synthetic Biology Society
Andrew Chang, Anne Cheever, Michael Fisher, Jeff Ubersax, Louise Horsfall
Synthetic biology offers significant promise for advances in health and medicine, food and energy production, and environmental sustainability. Realizing this potential requires continued commitment to driving bio-innovation, ensuring biosafety and biosecurity, and building a robust bioeconomy. This strategic action plan proposes the formation of an International Synthetic Biology Society to support the responsible development and deployment of synthetic biology in the public interest. While many disparate organizations are working in synthetic biology, there is currently no primary organization supporting the needs of diverse synthetic biologists seeking to steer and propel the broader trajectory of the field. A synthetic biology society could provide accurate and timely information about the state of the field to practitioners, policymakers, and the public. It would serve as a community forum to foster discussion, debate, and collaboration among diverse stakeholders and engage the public in learning about, and informing, members’ research. We aim to increase awareness and understanding of technical advancements to illustrate how synthetic biology affects, interacts with, and enriches our lives.
Opening New Channels for Industry-Academic Relations
Derek Lindstrom and Nathan Hillson
An effective approach to building relationships between culturally distinct organizations is through immersive experience. This strategic plan proposes to create an opportunity to place academic scientists into an industry-based postdoctoral position without jeopardizing their ability to compete effectively for tenure-track academic positions. In essence, we are offering a return ticket to academics interested in gaining industrial experience. The mechanism that we present is a modification of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award (the K99). This is an extremely effective award mechanism that promotes the transition from an academic postdoctoral position into a tenure-track faculty position by providing funding for both career stages. By broadening the K99 model to allow awardees to select an industrial position as part of their career path, we can leverage the advantages that make current K99 awardees highly competitive when they search for tenure-track positions. We believe that synthetic biologists would be particularly drawn to activating this award option and in doing so will catalyze a broader collaboration between industrial and academic biology.
Governance and Responsibility
A Call for a Public, Democratically Deliberative Facet in Synthetic Biology Policymaking
Ryan Ritterson
While the synthetic biology community enjoys support from a majority of people aware of its activities, it remains unknown to most of the nation. Further, policy makers do not rely on a coherent vision of synthetic biology in order to make regulatory decisions. This leaves a partial vacuum in the public decision making capacity for these new technologies that could stunt their development. Creating a unified vision for synthetic biology will require many new approaches and tools, and, because synthetic biology has the potential to change many lives in direct and profound ways, one facet of the vision must be an incorporation of public ideas. To accomplish this, this action plan proposes a public dialogue in the style of a Deliberative Poll, a model used successfully in many nations. The UK held a similar discussion and successfully incorporated its suggestions into its synthetic biology roadmap.
Circumventing the Paradox of Regulating Emerging Technologies
Walter Valdivia
New technologies create, at once, the need for regulation and resistance to it within regulatory agencies. Each bureaucracy is bound by law to protect public health and the environment but also seeks to avoid the risks of expanding the scope of its authority and having to mediate the concomitant political controversies. Hence, the paradox of regulating emerging technologies.
As part of a set of measures to address this paradox, we propose an advisory board for the regulation of emerging technologies, fashioned after boundary organization such as the National Science Advisory Board for Biosafety and Biosecurity. The regulatory Board, composed by distinguished experts in the relevant disciplines, would issue non-binding authoritative recommendations for regulating specific aspects or functions of the new technologies and assign them to specific agencies. Being non-compulsory and having an inclusive membership, its recommendations could help to legitimize administrative action and reconcile the political tensions inherent to regulation.
Risk Research and Practice
Coherent Block Funding for Microbial Environmental Risk Assessment and Mitigation Strategy Development
Nathan Hillson
Coherent Block Funding is a mechanism for government, industry, and institutional agencies to support and coordinate the assessment of environmental risks posed by genetically engineered microbes, and the development of strategies to mitigate these risks. In short, a single block of funding would support several testing facilities in addition to multiple individual investigators developing mitigation strategies. Unlike current funding mechanisms which distribute funding piecemeal at 5% or less of larger science projects, do not align the incentives of separate investigators, and make it difficult to accomplish meaningful outcomes, Coherent Block Funding can sustain real-world test-bed infrastructure and provide return on investment through establishing which mitigation strategies are actually effective. This strategic action plan aims to garner high-level support within federal and institutional agencies to prioritize Coherent Block Funding as a support mechanism for genetically engineered microbe environmental risk assessment and mitigation strategy development.
Synthetic Biology Biosecurity Tabletop and Corresponding Educational Tools
Ryan Morhard
This Strategic Action Plan proposes convening essential stakeholders within the synthetic biology and biosecurity community to participate in a biosecurity tabletop exercise meant to form the basis for a high-production web-based learning tool designed to enhance learning by enabling students, scientists, policymakers, and emergency professionals to virtually simulate participation in such an exercise. The in-person exercise, as well as the web-based simulation, would aid in establishing norms for researchers to follow during their research activities, and increase understanding between the research community and federal entities responsible for biosecurity, by exercising illustrative scenarios meant to provide education on respective roles in ensuring safe practice of synthetic biology and in evaluating and managing risks and consequences of a biosecurity emergency. Creating a shared understanding and facilitating communication between those that practice synthetic biology and policymakers leading government programs responsible for biosecurity risk and consequence management creates opportunities for improved coordination and comprehension and sets the foundation for policies and regulations that both preserve security and inspire innovation.
Standards and Sharing
A Vision for a Synthetic Biology Standards Consortium
Michal Galdzicki, Sarah Munro, Patrick Boyle, Jeff Ubersax
The promise of synthetic biology to be instrumental in improving global quality of life and economic security can not be realized if there is not a concerted effort to transform synthetic biology innovations into useful, safe, and affordable products. As synthetic biology continues to develop, growing numbers of government and non-government organizations have focused on how synthetic biology could be used to responsibly improve global quality of life while considering environmental and health safety issues. This action plan proposes the development of measurement, performance, and safety standards for synthetic biology by a multi-stakeholder consortium as an effective way of ensuring the responsible development and wide acceptance of this technology.
Incentive-Driven Information Sharing for Engineering Biology
Karmella Haynes
The public supports synthetic biology endeavors through tax dollars and private funding. The social mission of this action plan is to optimize the return on this public investment by facilitating the transformation of synthetic biology research into widely accessible information to support the development of new technologies. It describes development of an incentive-driven platform to stimulate and sustain crowd-sourced data sharing. This information will support future synthetic biology endeavors and the livelihoods of students and trainees in the field. Biosafety and biosecurity specialists will use this platform for interrogation and regulation of synthetic biology practices in order to mitigate potential harm. The scientific mission of this plan is to overcome barriers in the path toward the design of living systems by enabling cooperative, community-driven characterization of compatible (or incompatible) biological components.
Metafluidics
David Kong
Synthetic biologists need great tools to realize their creative visions. Microfluidic, or “lab-on-a-chip” instrumentation has the potential to be such a foundational tool for synthetic biology. Despite numerous examples of microfluidic devices performing complex processes central to synthetic biology, ranging from automating and miniaturizing DNA synthesis to performing single cell analyses, they are not commonly used. Microfluidics are not easy to make or use, and researchers are typically unable to leverage the designs and hardware of other groups. To help address these issues I propose in this action plan to develop metafluidics, a toolkit for microfluidics. The metafluidic toolkit leverages digital fabrication to make devices easy to manufacture, abstraction hierarchies for enabling intuitive interfaces to make them easy to use, and finally an open repository of device and hardware designs to make them easier to share and reproduce. Through metafluidics, microfluidics will hopefully become more accessible to synthetic biologists of all types, from students just learning about biology to cutting-edge innovators re-engineering organisms.
LEAP in words and pictures