Hope and Fear in Biotechnology

Abstract

This article draws out temporal and spatial affects such as hope and fear, trust and confidence, and assumptions of actors in plant biotechnology development and its regulation by the Federal Government of Canada. These underlie both insider developers' and regulators' hopes and trust, and outsider experts' and publics' anxiety and fear. Etymologically, hope is rooted in actual capacities or dunamis and in latent potency or potentia . Ethnographic interviews among researchers, producers, and regulators of plant biotechnologies in Canada conducted between 2001 and 2003 provide an empirical illustration of this argument. In the regulatory process for plants with novel traits (PNTs), different affective responses (hope, fear, trust) correlate with social insiders and outsiders around biotechnology generally and PNTs specifically. Insiders form a regulatory figuration in Elias's sense of the term. The spatiotemporal qualities of different affects—dunamis here and now versus the distant and future quality of potentia— “torque” discourse, risk-taking behavior, and calculations of standards of precaution.