Study title

United States

Event/process

The interviews and documents collected here are a part of a wider research project studying the construction of security concerns in synthetic biology. While some data was amiable to collection through interview formats, a significant portion was more appropriately collected through long-term observation and integration into the synthetic biology community. The interviews represent a sampling of the types of relationships the primary researcher, Sam Weiss Evans, worked with during the data collection process, including those with whom he interacted on only a few occasions, and those with whom he built a long-standing collaborative engagement relationship. The interviewees agreed to have their names released with the transcripts.The media are images, videos, reports, journal articles, and other items that have been a part of the conversation in synthetic biology about the construction and governance of its security concerns. These were collected over the length of the project through discussions I had with members of the community who were debating the (de-)merits of a particular article, video, etc. To build and maintain access to the community, I engaged in two exercises of embedding into different parts of the synthetic biology community. First, I spent four months at the beginning of 2014 at the central administration of the United States' National Science Foundation's funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (Synberc) at the University of California, Berkeley. I attended weekly administation meetings, presented at the Synberc retreat, and built a working relationship with the core set of researchers and administrators that made up this national research conglomeration. After that, I spent four months within the Massachusetts Inistute of Technology's Program on Emerging Technology, run by Professor Kenneth Oye. This Program has a very active stream of research focused on governance and security aspects of synthetic biology, and is tightly connected to the bioengineers and the policy world. I attended weekly lab meetings and contributed to the research projects being conducted, while also analyzing the process through which decisions were made about what did and did not deserve attention of the Program.Data analysis included a cross-referenced array of all sources to draw out similarities in the ways that areas of synthetic biology were constructed as being or not being matters of security concern.