In recent years, focus on enhancing the social responsibility of science has emerged from several actors such as citizen groups, governments and professional non-governmental organizations.  

But few people have actually investigated how scientists themselves feel accountable towards society or how they might develop and practice some forms of social responsibility in their daily work. This PhD project has its point of departure in this knowledge gap. Based on ethnographic case studies and interviews with scientists in the field of synthetic biology, this project seeks to map, how social responsibility is invoked and practiced in research organizations. It has a special emphasis on how ideas of responsibility connect or conflict with old ideals of the ‘disinterested objective scientists’ and new university reforms that enforce collaboration and competition into the core of the organizations.