The article presents a review of the research social science on the risks related to synthetic biology, identifying the main lines of research, their problems and the most relevant challenges, which their own researchers and promoters have described as being of high importance and incidence in the profound social consequences it could have. The review covers 50 articles indexed in Web of Science (WoS) and SCOPUS, published between 2009 and April 2020. The work identified four areas of research on the risks of synthetic biology: risks, regulation, governance, and controversies, recognizing the challenges and opportunities in each of them.