Team:Freiburg/Ethics

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Introduction

The experience, last years iGEM mediated us, clearly shows that students are willing to develop useful applications. They provided medical, environmental or mathematical/computational applications, with no reason to hide themselves from other scientific projects. The fact that students already deal with real scientific projects should expand their sense of responsibility. Normally universities provide basic knowledge and practical skills, but the opportunity to establish own scientific projects is rare. On the one hand enabling students to develop own projects is reasonable, on the other hand a safety problem could occur if this trust is betrayed.
Over the past years, progress in science and technology led to totally new possibilities in the field of synthetic biology. New technologies require new discussions, rules and ethical standarts. Therefore it is reasonable to discuss this within the scope of iGEM, in order that students already deal with the safety and responsible handling of their projects. Especially the progress of de novo gene synthesis, sequencing technologies and bioinformatics are the fundamentals for the rapid development of synthetic biology. Creating genes is a powerful tool given into the hand of students, leading to the question: Can they handle it?

Safety and ethical issues concerning synthetic biology

Bioengineers are often regarded as egomaniac, god-playing “Frankensteins”, bothering animals and plants. What is true about this one-sided perspective? Bioengineers certainly walk the thin line between manipulating life and creating life. Especially, uniqueness of living as part of the human self image confronts with the manipulation and creation of life. Creation of life was only related to god for ages while nowadays education and science change the picture rapidly, leading to a controversial discussion based on a mixture of fear, ignorance and well grounded critique.
In times of unlimited communication and information access, nearly everybody has the possibility to get DNA sequences from pathogenic organisms. It has never before been so easy to create biological weapons, for example Viruses. Every society has to deal with the fact that some people do not care about the accuracy of their behaviour.

Outlook

Considering the fact that about 672.910.000 people are living on earth and the number is rising, mankind will more and more face the circumstance to strike new path. Fast propagating diseases, malnutrition, environmental pollution and the understanding of biological systems are great upcoming challenges. Synthetic biology approaches promise to compete some of these problems. Handled with responsibility, there will be endless possibilities (understanding and treatment of diseases, yield increase of plants, bio-fuel generating bacteria and so on).

Discussion