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Democratizing biotechnology requires more than availability

Nature Biotechnology volume 39, page 403 (2021)Cite this article

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Jackson et al. provide valuable insights into the timeframes for the spread of biotechnologies and raise interesting questions about the technical and societal factors that can explain these changes. However, the conclusion that this increased accessibility amounts to democratization of biotechnology is premature at best. The democratization of science and technology has been extensively studied by scholars in social sciences and humanities over the last thirty years2,3,4. Without exception, these studies conceptualize democratization not as the need to spread technologies faster and further5, but to involve society in the development and governance of technologies, from identifying issues that merit solving in the first place to deliberating the particular technologies used to solve those problems. Equating accessibility to democracy instead assumes that the technologies in question are by definition desirable and beneficial, while this is exactly what is in question in societal controversies regarding new technologies, including various biotechnologies and their applications6.

In addition, by assuming the unconditional desirability of the wide availability of biotechnologies, democratic publics are portrayed as passive recipients of scientific work. Instead, democratic theory invites us to take publics seriously: to actively listen to publics and to include their interests and concerns in the design and application of new biotechnologies7,8, so that science and society to become mutually responsive to each other9. The timeframe from first usage to widespread availability certainly matters, but the praiseworthy objective of democratizing biotechnology invites us to move beyond that.

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  1. Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development–Innovation Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Koen Beumer

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Correspondence to Koen Beumer.

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Beumer, K. Democratizing biotechnology requires more than availability. Nat Biotechnol 39, 403 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-00890-y

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