What are the risks for nature?

In the sixth part of “Discours de la method”, Descartes says that Human tend to be “master and owner of Nature”. In this, we can say that science,globally, is going to lead us to a final objective. Progress in medicine or pharmacology permits us to extend the life duration, to manage our environment and also to use Nature as a “tool” for helping us to become “better and stronger”. However, if Sciences pursues the Cartesian objectives, is it really reachable? Here comes the question of place that Synthetic Biology takes in this pathway.


When you talk about Synthetic Biology, we understand that even if all complex mechanism which control life are not totally understood, Man is able to modify the deeper part of living forms (DNA), to control it and modify the abilities and capacities of living forms. That could be an issue, indeed, there is still a probability that we haven’t thought about a crucial point, which could lead to a complete loss of control. Here comes also the problem of dissemination. Even if we are the most precautious we can, and if all the rules to avoid dissemination are respected, can we still say that our labor if free of risks? In our own case, it could not be really important: indeed, Nature itself doesn’t need to know how to calculate in a binary way to improve itself and our bacteria is not composed of any potentially dangerous biobricks. Also we can reasonably think that even if a dissemination is possible, there will be no real damages or injuries.


However, we have to put things on perspectives. We clearly know that modified organisms are weaker than common bacteria, and if you put in presence a genetically modified and a non modified organism, the free of modification organism will always supplant the modified ones because of several deletion chromosome and bigger fragility of them. In addition of that, all the precautions we take to render the work free of risk, plus confinement we have to observe if we want successful manipulations, make us think that a massive and effective spreading is almost impossible. Clearly, since more than 10 years that iGEM championship exists, there was never any problem with dissemination or contamination, everything also points to reassure ourselves.


To summarize, although the “zero risk state” is unreachable (like in every field that implicate notion of risk by the way) we can truly think that problems concerning dissemination of living modified organism are for instance greatly treated. But, in order to get even further, we can put the following question on the debate: we see many team project directly relied on interactions between plants, or human body and modified organism. Many of those projects are very interesting and could help many people on the planet. Because necessary studies are not accomplished yet, they are for instance stuck in a “prototype state” because of the fear of dissemination and propagation on a modified organism. How will we deal with that in the future? Will be Humanity “ready”, in a close future to trust science enough to leave their fears and accept modified organism into their daily life?

Back to Ethical Aspects