Special perspectives section: responsible research and innovation for synthetic biology

In November 2014, a group of more than 100 scholars and practitioners from academia, industry, and non-profit organizations gathered in Tempe, AZ for an intensive two-day workshop to articulate the most important and pressing questions on the societal aspects of synthetic biology. The aim of the workshop was not just to reflect on the social science research that has been done around synthetic biology, but also to generate new questions to construct a new (set of) research agenda(s). A subset of the papers the participants wrote and circulated in advance of the workshop focused on the theme of responsible innovation; these authors agreed to revise their papers for this Special Perspectives Section. Together these articles communicate a diverse set of new ideas for work in responsible innovation.