The European Commission's Directorate General for Health and Consumers (DG SANCO) is organising a Workshop on Synthetic Biology: From Science to Governance (to be held on the 18^th and 19^th March 2010 in Brussels).

The Programme includes a presentation on the ‘4^th Generation of Nanomaterials’, a term adapted from the forecast of ‘Nanomanufacturing: Generations of Products and Productive Processes’, as introduced by Mike Roco (US National Science Foundation, and US Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology (NSET) Subcommittee (US National Science and Technology Council) in a 2004 paper entitled ‘Nanoscale Science and Engineering: Unifying and Transforming Tools’ (AIChE Journal, Vol. 50 (5), 2004, 890-897), which predicted the ‘4th [Generation of Products and Productive Processes]: Molecular nanosystems Ex: molecular devices ‘by design’, atomic design, emerging functions’ to be prototyped and commercialised from 2010 onwards.

The SynBio community regards nanotechnology as a tool set that enables and accelerates the advancement of synthetic biology. ‘Now nanotechnology not only allows synthetic construction, but also leads scientists to see cells as nanomachines [...]’ notes the EU’s recent publication entitled ‘Ethical Aspects of Synthetic Biology’ (Proceedings of the round-table debate, Brussels, 19^th May 2009; written by the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies to the European Commission (EGE), which, in 2007, published an ‘Opinion on the ethical aspects of nanomedicine’, EGE Opinion No. 21, January 2007). The analogies between these two disciplines of emerging technologies, however, run much deeper: both the SynBio and the Nanotech community are engaged in equivalent debates on ‘risk governance issues’, ‘adequacy of regulatory frameworks’, ‘public perception’, ‘risk/benefit judgments’, and ‘ethical and societal dimensions’; even some of the stakeholders participating in the debates are identical (cf. SCENIHR, IRGC, OECD, DG SANCO, etc.).

The publication ‘Ethical Aspects of Synthetic Biology’ concludes that ‘[b]iotech and nanotech developments show that this [the discussion and implementation of regulatory approaches] takes a considerable amount of time and therefore should not be postponed until real applications are there (although, of course, tension is created when it comes to regulating applications still under development). [...] Second, biotechnology and nanotechnology are also recent examples of emerging technologies that do call for broadening debate and decision-making (an important aspect of governance, although it still feels like experimenting).’

Follow these links to find out more about the EGE and its publications on ‘SynBio’ and ‘Nano’,  find out more about the Workshop on Synthetic Biology, or to download the Workshop Programme.