Philosophy and Ethics of our Project

This page is for the Philosophical and Ethical considerations surrounding our project to optimize a metabolic pathway in E. coli.

Eddie Miles- "Do we have the right to engineer living things specifically for our own benefit?" Related Article: Synthetic Biology: Drawing a Line in Darwin's Sand [1] Note: Some environmental ethicists assert that the evolutionary process serves as a normative foundation for environmental ethics, in other words, an organism's evolutionary history can/should be considered when making "ought" or "ought not" statements regarding these organisms. The main thesis of the above article is that synthetic biology, by separating an organism from its evolutionary history, is upsetting this normative foundation and that on these grounds, synthetic biology should be opposed. Although I haven't yet studied environmental ethics (first-year student here) and am not familiar with the argument for a normative value of evolutionary history, I'm initially skeptical of its relevance due to a few questions that it raises for me. For example, the assertion in the article is that this normative function tells us, at least in the case of synthetic biology, that we shouldn't "create" life due to the fact that we're separating the organism from its evolutionary history but even if the normative value of the evolutionary process can be well demonstrated, could this normative function ever tell us anything other than "don't play god"? If so, what other things can it tell us? If not, of what use is it to begin with?

Biology and Art- In what ways can synthetic biology be used to create art? What implications might our work have on the accessibility of "bioart"? How does this relate to the ethical questions that we've been considering? [2]

David, Kamay, and Corinne: What unforeseeable dangers might there be in technology like Gibson Assembly, which allows the possibility of synthetically constructing any existing or new sequences of genes?

• • This is a very rough summary of the things I have been thinking about in regards to the following topic. Feel free to add and edit where appropriate.**

Bioethics of Assembling Genomes(Combining the qualities of organisms and or creating new organisms)

The importance of being able to create and control life is paramount to synthetic biologists around the world. However, as be become more technologically advanced in our methods for doing this, it is of concern to our environment and scientific progress that we have an idea of where we are going and why. A futuristic outlook in my mind permits the creation of organisms that will one day change the face of our planet perhaps for the better, and maybe even the faces of other planets in our solar system or others. The ecosystems we engineer may improve the conditions of our planet to allow life to continue when it would otherwise fail. This will of course run the risk of unintended consequences which lead to more harm that benefit. In addition, there will be costs to the natural ecosystems that have developed. Many organisms would be selected out of existance, but this is not new to our planet. Ninety nine percent of all organism that have ever inhabited the earth are now extinct. We would also like to assume that our cultures will have evolved more mature systems of government that are less chaotic and more unified allowing us to make good decisions about these complicated issues. We currently have no reason to believe we will come to a point where we will achieve such goals, but in examining the way we procede we should be able to caution ourselves to foresee-ably dangerous technologies we may allow into the hands of others. On the bright side could engineer more nutritious foods that grow more easily to support our populations, engineer and release organisms that improve the health of our atmosphere and breathable air.. the details of what is possible are unlimited when you understand how complicated ecosystems are and what changes can make them thrive and/or fail.

David Carr

Alexander, Virginia: Is enough understood about synthetic biology to avoid unintended catastrophies? Related article: Synthetics: the Ethics of Synthetic Biology [3]