Team:KU Leuven/Human Practices

As the impact of synthetic biology is exponentially increasing and our project being part of that, we examined the implication of our project for the security, safety and environment. We formulated new approaches to ethical and philosophical considerations. A student of the department of philosophy is part of our team and wrote a blog during this summer together with one of our advisors. We evaluated our project against the background of the literature on ethics and synthetic biology, the so-called normative evaluation and we held a debate on ethical implications of synthetic biology. Next to that, all team members were interviewed to examine their ethical beliefs. The thinking of two philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas, was critically read and taken into synthetic biology to see whether the concepts they use are useful to evaluate synthetic biology. We used a psychoanalytical reading of synthetic biology to explain the current practices in research laboratories nowadays.