Social biotechnology: conceptual foundations, operational framework and the ontology of a new science for life

models of technology transfer, which often reproduce structural imbalances and dependency in marginalized territories (Abdullahi et al., 2025). This pillar empowers communities to exercise political, technical, and epistemic agency, allowing them to co-design situated innovation trajectories that transform their sociotechnical reality (Betancourt et al., 2026; Umbrello & O’Hara, 2024). This autonomy is articulated through three critical dimensions:

• Dismantling the “Black Box” model: This dimension challenges the deployment of closed, hermetic, and proprietary technologies. It proposes a radical openness to dismantle colonial dependencies, fostering the development of interoperable, sovereign, and open-source solutions that allow for the socialization of knowledge and collective governance over biological systems and processes (Purkayastha, 2024).
• Technical agency and self-determination: The collectivity transcends its role as a market niche to become an active subject through bio-citizenship. This requires technical independence and the exercise of self-determination, understood as the faculty to validate or reject biotechnological trajectories that compromise the cultural or ecosystemic integrity of the territory (Chan, 2024; Turnhout, 2022).
• Decolonizing innovation: This axis reverses the historical imbalance where the Global South provides the genetic base while the North concentrates intellectual property, demanding a transition from exclusionary regimes toward inclusive frameworks (Adaji, 2025). It addresses structural asymmetries in global governance by promoting distributed networks that ensure scientific sovereignty in the territories of origin (Canfield, 2023).

Governance of the biocommons: life as common heritage

Against the logic of genomic capital that fragments and privatizes biological information, this pillar positions technical knowledge as an inalienable heritage of the collectivity. It aims to transcend “enclosure biotechnology” through management based on the commons and technological inclusion, under the following premises:

• Biocopyleft and Open Science Systems: This model promotes Biocopyleft—an open-source licensing framework applied to biological materials, genetic sequences, and knowledge—to shield the openness of biological resources against restrictive intellectual property (Parolini, 2026). Unlike traditional patents, this framework guarantees the circulation of knowledge through inclusive governance, ensuring that any derivative development maintains free access and prohibits private appropriation (Adaji, 2025).
• Social Rate of Return (SRR) vs. Return on Investment (ROI): Beyond financial ROI, this approach establishes SRR as the central metric for biotechnological validation. Grounded in impact assessments (Basset, 2023), it prioritizes food sovereignty, public health, and ecosystemic resilience, transforming the “biological dividend” into collective well-being rather than mere capital accumulation.
• The community bio-library and genomic integrity. The framework manages codes and protocols as commons, shielding the territory through models of “protected openness” that ensure equity and prevent biopiracy (Parolini, 2026). This approach thus redefines the laboratory as a bio-library: a node of responsible flow oriented toward solving local problems (Chen & Pschetz, 2024). A compelling empirical application of this paradigm is demonstrated by Hogg et al. (2024), who integrated advanced genomic sequencing with Indigenous knowledge to conserve an Australian marsupial, establishing a successful model of data sovereignty, territorial equity, and practical problem-solving.

Territorial pertinence and technological contextualism

Social Biotechnology displaces the imperative of universal scalability in favor of the principle of Territorial Pertinence. Under this approach, the efficacy of an intervention lies not in its mechanical replicability, but in its capacity for dialogic coupling with the local ecosystem.

• The thesis of technological contextualism: A technology can only be considered “advanced” if it is capable of being integrated in a situated manner. Molecular or computational sophistication lacks ontological value if it requires inaccessible infrastructure or if it collides with the cultural matrix of the territory. True innovation lies in sociotechnical adequacy, which demands a transformation of science toward justice and sustainability (Turnhout, 2022).
• Situated biotechnological design and social reverse engineering: This model prioritizes biotechnological development “from and for” the territory, focusing on the genomics of resilience and distributed manufacturing systems. It promotes, for instance, the local production of bio-inputs—products of biological origin—derived from microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, viruses), macroorganisms, plant extracts, or natural bioactive compounds—used in agro-productive systems to improve crop nutrition, development, health, and productivity— (Ayaz et al., 2023) and essential drugs at the point of need, mitigating vulnerabilities through health sovereignty and the bioeconomy (Abdullahi et al., 2025).
• Epistemic hybridization and intercultural dialogue: The validity of a “science for life” resides in its capacity to integrate territorial and ancestral knowledges—traditions deeply rooted in ecosystem observation and practical experience. By conceptualizing the territory as the primary laboratory, these dialogues generate solutions with greater sustainability and relevance than those derived from dominant development models (Jasanoff, 2019).

Dialogue of knowledges and symbiotic transdisciplinarity

This pillar establishes a transdisciplinary convergence where molecular biology rigor integrates with political ecology and the ethics of life, overcoming traditional knowledge fragmentation through a paradigm of sociotechnical co-design.

• Systemic co-authorship of innovation: Social sciences and territorial knowledges move beyond a posteriori evaluation to become co-authors from the genesis of experimental design. This approach extends the laboratory into the community, recognizing local and ancestral knowledge holders as researchers and reconfiguring life as a web of relationships through agroecological co-design—a set of practices and a social movement applying ecological principles to sustainable food and agricultural systems (Fitzsimmons et al., 2026; Duchene et al., 2026).
• Biopromotionality and autonomy of the living: This principle reconfigures technical praxis as a catalyst for the autonomy of the bios, safeguarding its evolutionary integrity against extractive logics. Biopromotionality—the intrinsic or induced capacity of a biological organism to enhance, stimulate, or activate beneficial physiological or functional responses in another living system—serves as the cornerstone of this approach. By integrating multi-species interactions and optimizing responses to biological stress, this practice strengthens the adaptive capacity and climate resilience of living systems (Pehlivan et al., 2025).
• Biotechnological legitimacy matrix: Collectively, these pillars act as an ethical audit and evaluation matrix. Any project aspiring to the standard of Social Biotechnology must demonstrate consistency with this operational framework, employing participatory evaluation practices that ensure scientific progress is inseparable from social justice and the preservation of life (Kieslinger et al., 2022).

The following table (Table 1) provides a visual synthesis of the proposed operational framework for Social Biotechnology, integrating its four foundational pillars into a cohesive model.

Table 1

Operational Framework of Social Biotechnology: The Four Pillars.

‘Science for Life’ as an epistemological framework

Postulating Social Biotechnology as a ‘science for life’ demands an epistemological shift: transitioning from technoscience oriented toward the reduction and control of living matter to a praxis that recognizes its intrinsic dignity and ‘bio-autonomy’—the capacity of living systems to self-regulate and maintain their integrity independently (Umbrello & O’Hara, 2024). This transition reconfigures the ontological dimensions between science and existence (Jasanoff, 2019), moving beyond traditional applied biology through three axes: the rupture with mechanistic reductionism (Rosslenbroich, 2023); the adoption of the ‘Biosocial Holobiont,’ which conceptualizes organisms and their microbial communities as entities inextricably integrated into social, historical, and political contexts; and the redefinition of the biotechnologist as a mediator in processes of genomic capital (Borg & Policante, 2022).

Overcoming mechanistic reductionism

Conventional epistemology, rooted in Cartesianism—an epistemological and ontological model characterized by radical dualism and analytical rationalism—and positivism, fragments life to optimize isolated components. While this approach has driven technical advances, the decontextualization of biological systems for commercial purposes presents significant limitations for long-term socio-ecological integration (Borg & Policante, 2022; Wu et al., 2026). In contrast, Social Biotechnology proposes an ontology of indissoluble relationality, where scientific knowledge is inseparable from its sociopolitical implications.

• Critique of biological isolation: The legitimacy of biotechnology erodes when it dissociates from its vital purpose. Life transcends the boundaries of the cellular membrane and the genomic sequence; it is defined by its flow and interdependence with the social fabric. As Jasanoff (2019) argues, technoscience must restore meaning to existence, recognizing that every intervention irreversibly transforms the human and ecosystemic horizon (Chen & Pschetz, 2024). Under this premise, biotechnology abandons its status as an isolated practice to configure itself as an ecology of care (Hackfort & Saave, 2024).
• The ‘Biosocial Holobiont’ as a unit of analysis: This framework shifts the focus from the biologically isolated individual to the Biosocial Holobiont, assuming deep interdependence between organic well-being, community stability, and territorial health (Matyssek et al., 2022; Piloto-Sardiñas et al., 2026). By understanding biology as a web of interdependencies, it renders any technoscience that ‘cures’ a body while degrading its social or ecological environment epistemologically flawed (Hackfort & Saave, 2024; Pehlivan et al., 2025). Consequently, the Biosocial Holobiont integrates biological and human praxis, serving as the minimum unit of evaluation for innovation.
• Intervention as existential commitment: The biotechnologist transcends the role of an operator of living matter to become a mediator of vital processes. This is the core of Social Biotechnology: shifting the paradigm from dominance toward the construction of bonds that ensure regenerative sustainability (Kapoor et al., 2024; Pehlivan et al., 2025). By fracturing the supposed scientific “neutrality”—frequently used as cover for the commodification of knowledge—the researcher assumes the inherent political responsibility of their praxis (Canfield, 2023; Wu et al., 2026).

From centralized control to Bio-autonomy

Science for Life responds to the crisis of technoscientific legitimacy by shifting centralized biological control—a device for the standardization of genomic capital (Borg & Policante, 2022)—toward bio-autonomy. This praxis prioritizes technical sovereignty and the capacity of communities for self-management to preserve their existence with dignity against extractive logics (Umbrello & O’Hara, 2024). This transition unfolds through two conceptual shifts:

• Shifting the focus from ‘Biomass’ to ‘Dignified Life’: Prevailing technoscience often reduces living systems to commodifiable assets, operating through an ‘ideology of innovation’ that perpetuates historical structural inequalities (Canfield, 2023). Social Biotechnology reverses this by prioritizing the promotion of a dignified life. Instead of measuring success through scalable profitability, this model evaluates innovation by its capacity to strengthen territorial resilience and sovereignty (Abdullahi et al., 2025; Purkayastha, 2024).
• The ethical turn of scientific validity: Technoscientific validity transcends the laboratory to demand systemic ethical consistency. According to Umbrello & O’Hara (2024), any technical innovation—even if reproducible—lacks integral validity if it is socially exclusionary or ecologically degrading. Thus, this approach redefines science under an unavoidable commitment to the distributive justice of knowledge (Adaji, 2025).

Epistemology of care and participatory technoscience

Social Biotechnology functions as a catalyst for local agency, transmuting molecular rigor into an instrument for self-determination in contested territories (Hackfort & Saave, 2024; Turnhout, 2022).

• Symbiosis vs. Domination: This paradigm shatters the modern imperative to ‘master nature’—a narrative underpinning the extractivism of genomic capital (Borg & Policante, 2022)—in favor of an ontology of relationality. The goal is to decode biological languages to cohabit with them through regenerative collaboration that enhances biospheric autopoiesis: the capacity of the Earth system to maintain itself through complex, interdependent biogeochemical and ecosystemic processes (Collado-Ruano, 2026).
• Knowledge as a Tool for Care: Responsibility for the ‘other’ becomes the engine of scientific curiosity. Care materializes in design: the development of drugs and inputs oriented toward liberating health systems from patent dependency (Abdullahi et al., 2025), promoting health sovereignty and soil health (Kapoor et al., 2024; Pehlivan et al., 2025). As Chen & Pschetz (2024) suggest, technoscience must be configured as “ecologies of care” that recognize our ontological interdependence.
• Fundamentals of biosocial architecture: This architecture rests on ‘Expanded Interconnectivity’—the awareness of the social impact intrinsic to laboratory practice (Chan, 2024)—and ‘Regenerative Responsibility,’ which mandates that every innovation systemically improves the environment it intervenes in (Duchene et al., 2026). Thus, technoscience is no longer an agent of blind modernization, but a catalyst for regenerative sustainability in the Anthropocene (Collado-Ruano, 2026).

Operational dimensions and strategic deployment

As a ‘Science for Life’, Social Biotechnology must transcend rhetoric toward transformative intervention. Its operationality—the development of operational definitions and practical, measurable procedures designed to study abstract concepts—articulates Open Science and Service-Learning to foster prosocial leadership and territorial co-creation (Martín-Vargas, 2026). The following three dimensions elevate technique into a tool for emancipation.

Health dimension

While conventional biotechnology has prioritized high-cost interventions that commodify health as a restricted-access good, Social Biotechnology proposes a shift toward ‘Social Precision Health’. This approach reorients diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities toward territorial autonomy, democratizing technical access through situated infrastructures (Geiger & Bourgeron, 2026).

• Open-Source diagnostics: This dimension mandates the development of molecular tests—such as CRISPR biosensors or field-based PCR—under open-access protocols to dismantle current intellectual property barriers (Adaji, 2025). Service-Learning projects catalyze this process: by involving students and communities in the co-creation of tools, these initiatives democratize technical access and train a new generation of scientists committed to public health and sanitary sovereignty (Martín-Vargas, 2026).
• Territorial bioproduction and distributed manufacturing: Implementing micro-bioreactor nodes enables the synthesis of essential biologicals at the point of need, drastically reducing dependence on global supply chains. This strategy transcends logistical optimization, representing a fundamental step toward health sovereignty and the technological self-management of health systems (Abdullahi et al., 2025).
• The citizen as manager of their biopolitics: The subject transitions from patient-client to citizen-manager, acquiring technical capacities to oversee their own well-being. This molecular democratization, framed within bio-citizenship, promotes health through informed self-management and data transparency (Chen & Pschetz, 2024).

Agrifood dimension

Following the political economy framework of McKay et al. (2025), the agrifood dimension acts as an integrating axis, articulating social metabolism, market dynamics, and the sociopolitical structures that define food security. Consequently, agroecological innovation distances itself from the ‘Green Revolution’ model—characterized by closed technological packages—to adopt Social Biotechnology: an approach that hybridizes cutting-edge genomic innovation with situated local knowledge.

• Resilience genomics and precision editing: This approach employs molecular markers and precision editing to enhance native varieties against biotic and abiotic stress, preserving the collective ownership of seeds as a non-negotiable pillar of food sovereignty (Kapoor et al., 2024; Pehlivan et al., 2025).
• Bio-inputs and autochthonous microbiomes: Prioritizing local microbial consortia for soil regeneration constitutes a process-oriented biotechnology that replaces dependence on synthetic agrochemicals (Ayaz et al., 2023). This vision restores the health of the agroecosystem through biological symbiosis and respect for local biodiversity.
• The farmer as co-investigator: Research shifts to open-access laboratories under Service-Learning models, where agroecological co-design drives participatory genetic improvement (Duchene et al., 2026). This Open Science approach ensures the public domain of data, acting as an engine for socio-ecological justice.

Environmental dimension

Rather than functioning as a reactive industrial mitigation service, environmental management is redefined as a process of socio-ecological restoration, restoring collective agency over ecosystemic metabolism to the community (Collado-Ruano, 2026; Umbrello & O’Hara, 2024).

• Participatory bioremediation: Beyond technique, the deployment of biological agents constitutes an act of collective learning and historical reparation. To counter extractive co-option, the Service-Learning model redefines intervention as a ‘living laboratory’ for co-creation and prosocial leadership (Martín-Vargas, 2026), ensuring transparent impact through Open Science (Chen & Pschetz, 2024). An empirical example is the rehabilitation of mined-out areas in Marinduque, Philippines, where integrating local communities and assessing social acceptability transformed a standard protocol into a genuine process of territorial restoration (Alaira et al., 2021).
• Citizen biovigilance and networked monitoring: Deploying biosensors within civil society transforms environmental information into a public good. This model levels information asymmetry through biovigilance—the structured, ongoing evaluation of ecological, agronomic, and socio-technical impacts of biotechnological innovations—thereby validating participatory monitoring (Kieslinger et al., 2022) and ensuring territorial data availability under Open Science principles (Parolini, 2026).
• Biodefense and situated evidence: Community surveillance empowers territorial defenders with technical backing for litigation and advocacy, providing a scientific shield against external degradation (Betancourt et al., 2026). Ecosystem health thus transitions from a legal abstraction to an installed technological capacity, consolidating local resilience against corporate or climatic threats.

Discussion: toward a new global biotechnological governance

Conceptualizing Social Biotechnology as a ‘science for life’ is more than a semantic exercise; it is a demand for structural reform within the scientific system. This transition requires subverting the ‘biotechnology of control’ to erect a model of collective empowerment (Jasanoff, 2019).

Overcoming epistemic monopoly and establishing bio-autonomy

The current technocratic model, marked by structural asymmetries in resource governance, exercises an epistemic monopoly where profitability dictates innovation validity (Canfield, 2023; Benjamin, 2024). Social Biotechnology dismantles this by proposing a distributed governance that breaks the opacity of technological ‘black boxes’ (Purkayastha, 2024). In this framework, the authority to define urgent needs is redistributed, dissolving the hierarchy between ‘expert’ and ‘affected party’. Territorial and ancestral knowledges thus become co-authors from the genesis of the problem, providing an ecological and social validity absent in the extractive model (Fitzsimmons et al., 2026; Collado-Ruano, 2026).

Concurrently, the shift from centralized biological governance to local bio-autonomy cultivates situated technical agency (Umbrello & O’Hara, 2024). This paradigm embeds biotechnological sovereignty within human security agendas, recognizing that controlling the ‘source code’ of existence—seeds, drugs, and protocols—is as vital as physical integrity (Abdullahi et al., 2025). By reconfiguring restrictive intellectual property models, this framework empowers the Global South to transcend its role as a peripheral recipient, reimagining the laboratory as a locus for technical emancipation and bio-citizenship (Adaji, 2025).

A regenerative scientific system and the New Biosocial Contract

Advancing this paradigm requires overcoming the ‘publish or perish’ model—which erodes the scientific ethos—in favor of research with real-world impact (Timmis et al., 2025). This demands reconfiguring technology transfer through Open Science and Service-Learning to solve complex problems, free from exclusionary patent systems (Martín-Vargas, 2026). The Social Rate of Return (SRR) must quantify scientific vanguardism (Basset, 2023); consequently, funding agencies should adopt Biocopyleft and territorial pertinence as non-negotiable criteria for excellence. This regenerative science transcends centralized paradigms, fostering open-source knowledge networks and socio-ecological resilience.

Globally, this approach materializes through Social Innovation Nodes (SINs) (Geiger & Bourgeron, 2026). Aligned with translocal networks (Avelino et al., 2020), these nodes generate in situ biotechnological solutions. SINs empower territorial initiatives to “deepen” local autonomy while “expanding” translocally to access resources beyond conventional structures (Chen & Pschetz, 2024). Unlike traditional biotechnology, which relies on intellectual property to protect markets (Benoliel & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2025), Social Biotechnology safeguards collective well-being through the common good. Shifting from a “biopolitics of scarcity” to one of “shared abundance,” this framework drives a more inclusive and democratic model of global cooperation.”

Final Considerations

Social Biotechnology is not a peripheral alternative; it is a systemic necessity to overcome the exhausted technocratic model. Transitioning from an extractive bioscience toward a ‘Science for Life’—understood as an inalienable common—is the logical step to address current planetary challenges. Moving beyond the dichotomy of technicalism and activism, this paradigm leverages the Social Rate of Return (SRR), Biocopyleft, and distributed governance to transform utopia into a methodology of real impact. By translating molecular rigor into community praxis, technological maturity is no longer measured by the capacity to patent, but by the ability to heal, feed, and regenerate living systems—restoring biotechnology’s ontological purpose: guaranteeing the dignity of existence.

Adopting this framework demands dismantling institutional isolation to recognize the social fabric as the ultimate 21st-century laboratory. By hybridizing scientific rigor with redistributive justice, researchers become facilitators of socio-environmental equity, validating their praxis through knowledge co-production.

Ultimately, Social Biotechnology constitutes the new biosocial contract of our era. It establishes a non-negotiable commitment: to transform the life sciences from an instrument of exclusion into a bridge for emancipation, enabling humanity to design its future through sovereignty, an ethics of care, and planetary solidarity.