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Team:Freiburg/Safety/engineering life
From 2013.igem.org
Engineering Life:
To the ethical and societal relevance of synthetic biology
In the end of September we participated at this seminar at the Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine of the University of Freiburg. It was the last session in a variety of meetings during 3 years. All meetings were gathered in the project with the topic Engineering Life: An interdisciplinary approach to the ethics of synthetic biology .
Here, different institutions investigated in the field of synthetic biology with the aim to clarify
a) if it is justified to speak about creating life,
b) how the reproach against science to "play God" could theologically be interpreted,
c) how risks and chances of this field of research shall be analyzed,
d) if the legal regulations were appropriate,
e) if there is a divergence in the systematical conditioning and actual research in synthetic biology.
During the last seminar from 26-28/9/2013 these questions arose again and again.
On 26/9/13 it was discussed how a future society based on biotechnology could look like.
Therefore, several movies from the Bio-Fiction film festival in Vienna were shown, where artists and filmmakers should visualize their associations with synthetic biology.
Here, the panel discussion came to the result, that many of the movies showed the chances but also the risks of synthetic biology. Some aspects of mythology reappeared in the movies e.g. breathe life into a golem, a statue of clay that obeys orders.
In general, the risks always seemed to have a stronger effect on the audience than the benefits had. Furthermore, synthetic biology seemed to be connected with some kind of industrialization and a symbiosis of nature and technology.
On 27/9/13 genetically engineered machines were in the focus of the curriculum. Thus, central questions arose e.g.
Living machines - a contradiction?
'Creating life! - Playing God?'
With these questions in mind the discussion went into a direction, where the role and the character of human beings was exposed in the light of synthetic biology. It was realized that within synthetic biology homo faber, a human that changes and modifies his environment, evolved to homo creator, a human that creates his environment anew.
This led automatically to the question if we would be in need of new laws and limits in order to safe the original environment and to beware the society from a next generation of bioweapons. This was the main topic of the last day of the seminar on 28/9/13.
Here, the panel discussion showed that differences in e.g. European and US-law make it difficult to assure the safety of the environment. Therefore, it was expressed that a global gremium should adjust international laws concerning biotechnology and synthetic biology as it was already done in other discussions e.g. superviruses.
