Care-full Synthesis: Advancing Global Engagement on the Socio-Ethical Implications of Synthesising Human Genomes is a Wellcome-funded social science research programme running in parallel with SynHG (Synthetic Human Genome), the Wellcome-funded scientific programme developing the foundational and scalable tools, technologies and methods for synthesising human genomes.
Care-full Synthesis investigates the emerging socio-ethical, economic and political implications of synthesising large genomes, including human genomes. Through transdisciplinary and transcultural research across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Americas, it examines how evolving social ethics can be brought into meaningful dialogue with scientific practice, public engagement and policy development. Particular attention is given to epistemic inclusivity within and across countries, as well as to emerging public–private partnerships and new interest groups shaping the field.
Hosted by the Centre for Global Science and Epistemic Justice (GSEJ) at the University of Kent, the project builds on GSEJ’s global network of academic and civil society partners and its work to advance a new ‘Odyssey’ (O.D.E.SS.I.) for science–society dialogue: an approach that is Open, Deliberative, Enabling, Sensible & Sensitive, and Innovative, and seeks to coordinate diverse aspirations and collective action around scientific potential.
Ultimately, Care-full Synthesis aims to establish a new paradigm for accountable science and innovation in a global age by fostering differentiated but coordinated ‘critical social uptake’: critical in the sense of necessity, recognising both the pivotal contribution that widening scientific possibilities could make to social and ecological wellbeing and how such needs necessarily differ across social contexts; and critical in the sense of reflexivity, ensuring that social uptake remains deliberative, questioning and responsive. In doing so, the project seeks to bring technical possibilities and diverse socio-ethical perspectives into careful synthesis, so that synthetic genomics, and engineering biology more broadly, can develop in ways that serve the common good.
