CIDA Seminar Series Rob Smith

CIDA Seminar Series

In this talk we want to ask what space there might be for responsible innovation in a promissory and extremely enthusiastic plant science programme. Britain’s newest funder, the Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA) will be both familiar and distinctive to many. Modelled after DARPA, its mantra is to “empower scientists to reach for the edge of the possible”. One of its first “big bets” is using plant synthetic biology to “fast track crop development to stay abreast of our changing climate”. This Synthetic Plants Programme is starting with the potato, perhaps an idiosyncratic choice, but many of the engineering visions are longstanding and include nitrogen fixation, pharming or blight resistance. Yet the programme team also talks passionately about sustainable abundance, of wanting to foster collaborative research environments, and of their desire for this research to leave the world in a better place than it is today. And because it is new, ARIA is also an experiment in governance as directors and project teams work out what these dreams might mean in practice.

We are one of two social scientific teams within the Synthetic Plants Programme. We have been invited to use qualitative, collaborative and creative methods to open-up discussion about the kinds of commitments already embedded in the programme, the kinds of futures it might create and the ways in which it might solve actual agricultural problems. We’ll share some of our early findings from stakeholder interviews and ask you to help us make sense of them with us. Finally, we’ll show some prototype collaborations that might explore the dilemmas raised when using emerging technologies such as synthetic biology and AI to create more sustainable forms of agriculture than dominate today.