In collaboration with multimedia designers from the Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, the San Francisco Exploratorium, as well as with researchers in the synthetic biology community, SynBERC researchers Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett are designing and development of a web-based multimedia platform for public understanding and critical debate of synthetic biology: Ars Synthetica. Designed to engage specialists and non-specialists in informed, ethical, and democratic dialogue of an emerging field, Ars Synthetica has multiple participatory channels for exploring questions about ethics, security, and how cutting-edge research in the biosciences is organized, governed, funded, and expanded. How will synthetic biology shape and be shaped by medicine, energy, and environmental needs? Whose business is ethics? What are the limits to what we can design? These are the kinds of questions that Ars Synthetica is posing to expert and lay communities alike.

A core premise of synthetic biology is that standardizing biological design will have significant ramifications for medicine, energy, and the environment. Currently there is a lack of forums for learning about and reflecting on these ramifications as they unfold. Ars Synthetica is uniquely positioned to connect synthetic biology's technical goals and practices to global communities of concern. Our intellectual agenda is to move beyond traditional modes of “bringing the truth to the people,” and toward a real-time conversation between experts and non-experts about how research really works, and how it ought to work. In this way Ars Synthetica is designed to be a mechanism of publicity and debate for our ongoing work in biosecurity, ethics, and pedagogy.

The public beta is online at www.ars-synthetica.net, and Rabinow's team is now working to produce a large series of photoessays, interviews, video clips, and interactive forums that describe current practices in synthetic biology and critically address its ethical ramifications.