Abstract

Policymakers and scholars have employed technology assessment to formulate and deliberate policy and social agendas by anticipating plausible futures for the last half century. Proposing a reflexive hermeneutics approach and taking a case of synthetic biology, this study illustrates how TA discourses are socioculturally and institutionally bounded. The case study leads to the conclusion that future-oriented conceptions of the ‘precautionary’ and ‘proactionary’ intertwine with general concepts including biosafety, biosecurity, bioeconomy, and biodiversity. These general concepts together with the advent of disruptive innovation in synthetic biology have already affected perception of possible futures.