The thought terminating cliches of “public engagement” in science

Opening up at Asilomar

I’m on the plane heading back home from The Spirit of Asilomar, three days on the California coast with historians, social scientists, policymakers, activists, artists, and synthetic biologists reflecting on the history and future of biotechnology, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA. A meeting co-created by historians of science and futurist synthetic biologists offers a particularly interesting lens through which to look at the patterns that shape the ways we think about progress in science.

The conference was rich and complex with a lot to unpack, but I want to focus on one thread of conversation that I’m particularly stuck on: the scripts we repeat when scientists think together about “public engagement.” At Asilomar, as with any gathering of biotechnologists, issues about public perception and engagement were top of mind. The thought spiral for a lot of folks coming from science and engineering backgrounds looks something like this:

• Progress in biotechnology is gated by public acceptance. People hate GMOs :(

• Public acceptance is gated by fear. People fear GMOs.

• Fear is gated by understanding. People don’t understand GMOs.

• Understanding is gated by education. Conclusion: we must teach the children about GMOs. Perhaps in 30 years people will not hate anymore and progress can happen.

This is a black hole of thought terminating cliches, comforting phrases that externalize blame, end conversations, and stop us from really examining these issues with any real depth and rigor. This leads to public engagement tactics and messages that are tone deaf, pointless and, more often than not, alienating and counterproductive.

At Asilomar, Grace and I hosted a workshop where these issues ended up becoming openers of conversation rather than closers. How does perception impact progress? What are the sources of fear and mistrust? Do we understand the problems we are solving and the people we serve? Could we seek mutual transformation through education and engagement? Throughout the conversation, the group made slogans and posters aimed more at “scientist engagement” rather than “public” engagement.

• On acceptance — You might have heard arguments (themselves thought-terminating cliches) like “well if you reject GMO in food, would you also not take recombinant insulin??” What if we took this argument not as the mic drop closer that people intend it to be, but as an opening to examine the ways someone might make decisions about their food and medicine? Why might someone want lifesaving medicine on the one hand but look for snack options that better represent their tastes and preferences on the other? Whether or not something uses recombinant DNA is usually not the primary driver of consumer choice, instead what matters is what it’s for, what the alternatives are, what it feels like, what it costs, who is promoting it, and the values it represents. Maybe acceptance isn’t about education with the hope that people will someday want what you make, but about making things people want.

• On fear — I have written recently about the role fear plays in communicating about biotechnology. Ironically, it’s the fear that scientists have of being misunderstood that triggers more fear and mistrust in a vicious spiral. This is a common pattern in history, present back at the original Asilomar meeting as well. In his excellent article on the 1975 Congress, journalist Michael Rogers wrote of participants being anxious about speaking with the press present: “Paranoid behavior is guaranteed to engender the journalistic suspicion that something is up.”

  During our 2025 workshop, the group gathered discussed how the anxiety we have about rejection of genetic engineering leads us to focus on finding different words to talk about what we do, which ends up obfuscating the value and values of what we want to talk about. Rather than try to avoid the conversation by using different words, we talked about how it’s important to be “unapologetically genetically engineered,” straightforwardly talking about what it is, what it does, how it’s made, and why.

• On understanding — Being unapologetically genetically engineered does mean opening ourselves up to people sharing their concerns and questioning the value of what we’re doing. Trust requires being trustworthy, and being trustworthy requires vulnerability. Breaking the cycle of fear and mistrust means being vulnerable to people not liking what you’re doing, and being willing to take no for an answer. This is incredibly hard, because it means facing deep fears we all have about rejection and misunderstanding. The work of building understanding requires first understanding ourselves and our fears, as well as approaching questions with curiosity and a genuine interest to understand, not dismissal or appeals to authority.

• On education — Education therefore is critical to understanding, but it’s education that goes both ways. There is a lot to learn to understand the grand challenges that science and technology seeks to solve. There is a lot to learn about the public — first being that there is no one “public” at all, but billions of individuals living as part of many different communities and cultures. I’m grateful to the historians, humanists, social scientists, and artists that have been part of our community in synthetic biology for the ways they have helped me to learn to open up and to continue to approach these questions with curiosity.

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There’s another common thought terminating cliche that pops up in “public engagement” — “we’ve been doing genetic engineering for ten thousand years.” This is story emerging from the fear narrative, intended to quell worries about genetic manipulation and the alteration of genes. But it’s also meant to close off further discussion. We’ve already been doing this, why are you worried? Let us get on with it.

At Asilomar, one of the most hopeful and interesting threads of discussion used this fact not as the end of the conversation, but the beginning. If indeed we have been doing genetic engineering for 10,000 years, what are the principles and practices that have guided that transformative relationship with the living world? What are the guiding visions and values of an indigenous biotechnology? What might a biotechnology rooted in stewardship of nature over many thousands of years look like? What if the design principles for synthetic biology were based on kinship and reciprocity rather than, or in addition to, engineering and abstraction?

There were no answers or endings to these conversations at Asilomar this week. And perhaps that is the most important lesson to take away from the meeting—that the goal isn’t to end the conversation with acceptance of a consensus, but to continue trying to make meaning together.