 I'm a social scientist, and I work in a field called Science and Technology Studies, where we examine the interconnections between social and technical developments. I'm going to start my presentation with a duck and a bridge, and I'll hope to show you what these have to say about my topic of engineering biology and society. So, I'll start off with the duck, and this is the Digesting Duck from 1739, and it was an attempt to apply the engineering ideals of the time onto a biological system. And I think we're seeing the same thing happening in synthetic biology, where we see engineering ideas being applied onto biology, and I'll give you a couple of examples of this. My first is from the field of mechanical engineering, and it's this idea of a chassis. And in synthetic biology, the word chassis is used to mean the biological context into which parts can be put. In other words, it's another name for the cell. So, a question that interests me is what happens when we start calling a cell a chassis? What does that enable, and what does that suppress? Does it encourage us to ignore the unique features of a living thing, or does it facilitate our understanding of what it means to engineer with biology? My second example comes from computer engineering, and it's an idea called refacturing, and it means rationalising and cleaning up computer code. And synthetic biologists do something very similar, they attempt to rationalise and clean up genetic code. So, these are two examples of where ideas from engineering have become imposed onto biology. Now, obviously, synthetic biologists realise that biology is very different from the things that we normally engineer. But I do think that the engineering aspirations of synthetic biology could perhaps have profound implications on the types of things that are brought into the world in the future as this speculative artwork suggests. So, that's my kind of idea of engineering biology, and now I'm going to turn to engineering society into my bridge. And the specific bridges I want to talk about are those that leads over the roads that go from New York through Long Island to the beaches and parks beyond. And as you can see about this bridge is actually very low, which means that buses can't pass underneath it. And the story goes that Robert Moses, who actually designed these bridges, purposely designed them so that poor people who didn't own cars couldn't get to the beaches beyond. So, here we see how something as simple as a bridge actually has social values built into it. And there are many other examples of this. Perhaps a more positive example is that we've routinely come to expect that our public transport system should have disabled access built into them. But this only came about after decades of pressure from disabled rights activists. So, technologies enable things and they prevent things and they embody what we value as a society. And I think the same thing applies in synthetic biology because synthetic biological designs have values built into them. And just to give you an example, there's a strong movement towards developing biological parts that can easily be shared. And these types of decisions about intellectual property will have important implications on the future of synthetic biology and on who can be part of this future. So, in engineering biology, synthetic biology is a simultaneously engineering society. So, I think it's really important to think about what type of future we want synthetic biology to bring into the world. And just to give you an example of this, there's lots of talk of synthetic biology being the next industrial revolution. But I don't think we should forget that the last industrial revolution resulted in tremendous inequalities and environmental destruction. So, perhaps synthetic biology should try and build a different future, one that is more sustainable. And one of the ways I think we should do this is by having interdisciplinary conversations which will necessarily include dissenting voices. And this is because there are many different ways of imagining how we should best make use of our powers to manipulate the biological world. And there are many different paths that we can take. And one of the reasons I'm so keen on interdisciplinary collaborations is because I had a project bringing together synthetic biologists, social scientists and artists and designers called synthetic aesthetics. And many things arose out of this project including disposable packaging that builds its own contents and cheeses made from the bacteria that grow on human skin. So, one of the kind of objectives of this project was to challenge synthetic biology and to stop it going down narrow and unimaginative paths. And this brings me back to my main point that in engineering biology we also engineer society. And if we want to build a better technology in a better society, we have to acknowledge that the two cannot be separated.