The Democracy of Chimeras: Governing the Risks and Critics of Synthetic Biology in France and the United States.

Summary Synthetic biology is an emerging biotechnology that aims to produce organisms that do not exist in nature for industrial purposes. Long before its applications were developed, this project aroused keen interest, but also early criticism. This technoscience attracted the attention of public authorities in France and in the United States very early on, seeking to govern it "upstream" of its applications - and to respond to the early protests that opposed it. This temporality of government is the object of study of the thesis, an investigation conducted with the tools of the sociology of science and risk. We follow the social construction of the risks and problems of synthetic biology, the devices put in place and the numerous actors they mobilize: bio-engineers, social scientists, FBI agents, amateur biologists, protesters. In France, the first problem of synthetic biology is its capacity to be contested, as genetically modified organisms were before. Its political and scientific promoters seek to develop it and to satisfy civil society through participatory mechanisms, but they have no control over this development. In the United States, the critics are marginalized, and it is especially feared that synthetic biology could be used by terrorists, which the authorities seek to prevent while preserving technoscience and its merchandise from any regulation. Thus, beyond the variety of these mechanisms, the thesis gives an account of two forms of "upstream" government, which have in common that they never question synthetic biology, but rather govern the problems that could hinder it: a science-society government in France, a security-market government in the United States.