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