Team:Paris/EthicalReportFullIntroduction

Preface

 * Why wonder about ethics in a biological engineering competition?

The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (IGEM) is an undergraduate competition begun at the MIT in 2004. In four years the competition grew up exponentially from 5 teams in 2004 to 110 teams in 2009. Within the context of its participation in IGEM 09 competition, the Paris team proposes a reflexion about ethical stakes in synthetic biology, in order to exercise our critical reflexion. Our “disciplinary” motivations to lead that ethical reflexion will be developed in a more formal introduction. We propose to wonder, in that preface, about the several “causes” of the necessity of that reflexion, mainly by wondering about the way interdisciplinarity encourages reflexivity. We wish to establish the fact that ethical reflexion is necessarily linked to a critical perspective, a point will be enlighten in the introduction.

Synthetic biology can be read as an encouragement to interdisciplinarity, as a disciplinary challenge by bringing together, in a unique life science, perspectives from engineering and practices from molecular biology. That interdisciplinarity stimulates researchers the necessity to change from their initial “disciplinary standpoint” in order to come up to synthetic biology specifications, requiring them to change position, to become alternatively insider and outsider towards their own science formation. That change sometimes permits the development of a critical perception, or, at least, makes it more attainable. That critical perspective permitted by reflexivity is one of the ways to get to ethical reflexion.

Among the large field of synthetic biology, the IGEM competition invites young scientists, future researchers to interdisciplinary experimentation. Heterogeneous teams, focus on freedom, innovation and motivation can lead teams to perform that disciplinary “insider/outsider” team standing. The specifications of the competition encourage to this reflexive position. In other word, the point is how exploration and experimentation in the way to build up an IGEM project can lead teams to that critical reflexion. Freedom and experimentation, encouraged by the structure of the competition, make the ethical reflexion both relevant and accessible to the teams' mind.

If we go ahead with our inquiry, crossing several institutional or disciplinary structures which promote a critical standpoint and ethical reflexion, we have to examine our own structure of participation in the competition : our team. We can find two “original” explanations to that reflexivity of the team. The Parisian team is build by volunteers to the “IGEM call” made by the Center for Research and Interdisciplinary not only because of the student's membership of a certain university. Therefore, the team is hybrid both socially and disciplinarily. Students come from high school or undergraduated programs, and differences in disciplines and specializations are large and various. At first, we had to make an effort to understand each other's different backgrounds. In the course of the project development, that “different regard” of the members was transformed, becoming a “shared regard” by building up our project and knowledge, in the process of building a team.

These differences between members, understood as a wealth, were already in the mind of the researchers of the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity. The Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) was founded in 2005 at the Medical University of Paris Descartes and defines itself as a convivial place at the crossroad between Life Sciences and exact, natural, cognitive and social sciences. New ways of teaching and learning are daily practices at the CRI, for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and researchers. The originality of the collaborative, non-hierarchical interactions between students and teachers can be found in the autonomy of the student (they collectively choose the content of the classes) but also in the main research's themes and perspectives. The CRI “call for participation” to IGEM has to be understood in that perspective of giving to students critical tools, understood as a wealth in the scientific approach.

Several effects and new questions will rise of that interdisciplinarity, reflexivity and critical perspectives. What are the effects of that institutional and disciplinary causes of the ethical questions? Why and how can we enlighten what is “new” in biological engineering and in the IGEM competition through ethical reflexion? As we will analyze it in the introduction, we will have to consider the ethical reflexion as necessary, once we have admitted the social responsibilities of science and scientists regarding the social effects of their theoretical and material production. Our work will be lead by an other imperative of the ethical reflexion, in order to make it concrete and not to give up to that intellectual temptation to go through concepts and methods without actually “doing something” about it. That imperative is making that ethical reflexion “practical” and so, to see who, where and when the decision process is made and how we can operate on it. Beside our aim, a rapid check on the institutional literature about synthetic biology (see "Institutional text and researches" here ) make us consider the fact that reflexion is shared between different kinds of actors of that scientific field, especially States, international organizations and national agencies. The ethical questions about synthetic biology are also and mainly about questioning the governance of the field. How, as a first step, will we manage the debate? Then, how will we supply the decision making? In other words, who is going to decide? Who, after putting stakes into light, will deal and manage the tensions linked to that stakes? That tension is inherent to what could be the definition of “scientific ethics” : the coexistence, the “harmony” between a free scientific research, both in theories and practices, and the social responsibilities of those scientific theories and practices. The necessity of the ethical question can now be seen as “viral”, once accepted, it leads us necessarily to the question of the governance, of the decision making, of the action and regulation, from now, each seen as something necessary too.

Methods
The theoretical approach in this report can be regarded as quite “singular”, and that singularity has to be explained. I am student in Science and Technology Studies in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales of Paris and my thesis focus on practices in the field of synthetic biology. Before participating in IGEM, I worked on collaborative projects with the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity which sponsored the creation of the inter-institute Paris IGEM team, I wanted to be part of the Paris IGEM team in order to observe the team in the 2009 competition and to see how the team engineered biology and how they dealt with and interpreted the ethical aspects of synthetic biology. This participation was a very good way for me to enlighten knowledge and productions process of a team of student in synthetic biology and for the other students to reflect on ethical issues, which we were able to build on together.

With this perspective, and I am to avoid the conceit “sociological” in my observation, nevertheless this report has to be understood from the perspective “science and technology studies”, with references and concepts that are situated in that academic context. My primary goal in precisely situating my point of view is to be precise what it is not : this report is not the reflexion of a scientist about his/her own practices, but the look of a student of science and technology studies about what students of science are saying about their work.

In my daily work with the IGEM team, some important methodological questions had to be answered : I decided to use a qualitative and participant-based approach, preferring collective experience of reflexion of ethical reflexion to data. This report won't have any graphics with team-members-answers to pre-set questionnaires, instead our meetings and talks were dynamic and I decided not to constrain the scope of the discussion by my up stream reflexions. That process also permitted discussions were coexisted sociological and scientific stakes, when everyone of us were trying to find answers to our own research programs. That was, for me, the greatest benefit to my privileged access to a scientific field, having the opportunity to discussed these questions with the team.

My discussions with the team started with a series of individual conversations with almost all students of the team. Depending on student, these discussions were all very different and at the end of the first round of conversation, I sought to bring together all the different stakes and questions brought by the individual team members in a collective and dynamic reflexion process. We decided to schedule collective talks, each about one hour long and focusing an pre decided themes, in order to delimit stakes. For certain discussions, I had to make a presentation, to put into light the history of a concept, to share with the team my reading on the subject or to highlight what seemed important to me, as a sociologist. That way, I shared with the team my own system of references, they were able to know through what “regard” I appreciated their words and reflexions.

After that talks, and in keeping with the IGEM' spirit, I decided to fill the ethical part of our wiki with an abstract of the discussion blended with my analysis on them. These posts had the form of blog's posts, as a individual, local and situated analysis. This report is more formal, but I propose it to be read in parallel with those informal posts. Both of these types of writing were important to the process of creating a dynamic reflexion of the ethics of synthetic biology. While formal essays are still valuable as a way to express our analysis of any topic, social studies sometimes miss the advantages of informal reflexion (fluidity, experimentation in the writing process, different kind of discourses, vocabulary or lexicon). Both styles were a good exercise, permitting me to scour, to search different ways to explore and uncover the stakes of synthetic biology.

Introduction
Synthetic biology is a young branch of contemporary biology, which aims to design functional modules in an organism, taking the advantages of different methods to develop the capacity of that organism to “do” and to “be” something new, something that isn't naturally in its own capacity. Synthetic biology embodies the meeting of two assembled elements : the manipulation of  organisms modified by man (technologies already developed by molecular biology) and an engineering approach through the aim of standardization.

By using an engineering approach, synthetic biologists hope to discover underlying design principles in genetic networks and to develop new standards for how biologists manipulate genes. Tim Gardner and Jim Collins' biological toggle switch is a good example of this engineering approach. Using simple, standardizable genetic modules, they were able to build a switch in E coli that controls its behavior. Thus, knowledge from genetics is transformed to work for engineering purposes. Through standardization, it is hoped that discoveries and progress in synthetic biology will be usable at a large scale, will be included in a common reference and could create a harmonious and protocolar ensemble.

The emergence of a new discipline, of new forms of knowledge, new sets of practices and handling is “socially” accompanied by new discourses, tales, hopes, anguishes, etc. That new “whole” will have built-in stakes, references and paradigms that affect our regard of the world. Our reflexion is about ethics in synthetic biology. Thus, we will poll, question those hopes, anguishes and promises linked to that new discipline in that ethical perspective.

The ethical reflexion has some intellectual constraints : we will have to take account of and challenge the abstraction of the moral and normative while facing the complexity of the social world it is trying to rule. Ethics in science is quite difficult to define, I decide to consider it as the challenge of the coexistence of a free scientific research, both in theory and practices, and the social responsibilities of those scientific theories and practices. In this introduction, we will have to consider two sets of stakes, two dimensions relevant to that challenge. At first, in the field of ethics : how and for what aim was the ethical reflexion on the sciences built? Then, in the field of science : why do scientists have to consider, through the concept of risk, the social world?


 * Perspectives from the field of ethics : polyphony and the moral imperative.

Deontology in science (as a professional ethical code or a code of professional responsibility), since Hippocrates, was gradually twisted, invested, questioned by a series of social actors and disciplines. It no longer belongs to doctors and, largely, to scientists, on their own and in a “corporatist” way, traditional and endogenous, to rule the moral implications of their works and productions. It is an ethics “by doctors, for doctors”.

The main rupture which leads us from medical ethics to bioethics happened after World War II, with collective reflexions about human rights and science, coming to us from the “by doctors, for doctors” perspective. During the 60's, two kinds of events happened that shaped the development of bioethics : some scandalous cases (for example the Thalidomide, the Brooklyn and Willowbrook cases) and the emergence of new critical and political discourses claiming individual rights, autonomy and contesting authority, and, through that criticism, medical and scientific authority.

The singularity of bioethics comes from this plurality of legitimate social actors, disciplines and discourses about “good practices in science”. Among these, medical and scientific discourses are joined with discourses from the theological and juridical fields, as well as discourses from activists, ecologists, citizens, consumers, patient, etc. That singularity comes with a enlargement of the scale of the object of the ethical thought : from medicine to life science. In the United States of America during the 70's, that movement came with a polarization of the ethical concerns : some specialized sectors of ethics were rising (bioethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, etc), showing that the point is now both about building a system of ethical references and a rational procedure of decision-making. It enlightens the pragmatical concern at work in that new ethical perspective.

Legitimacy seems quite hard to attain : the one who detains scientific knowledge is no longer the only one who “can” and “must” express the social ins and outs about a scientific discovery or progress. There is a dissociation between modes of legitimacy of bioethical discourse and forms of “traditional” scientific gratitude. We can notice that new participants of the debate are “uninitiated” persons or a “mixed group”, expressing themselves in new structures (institutional or not), new moment of expression, and new recommendations. Temporality, form and dynamics of discourses are now numerous, hybrid and unrivaled. Exteriority from the scientific field is now a criterion of legitimacy, regarding the fact that internal motivations of the speakers are not involved in the moral imperative expressed.

These new expressions of “good practices in science” lead us to a new problem : it reveals a new and complex prescriptive dimension to the bioethical discourses. Actually, the pragmatical objective of that ethical reflexion is to prescribe. It makes use of an imperative, a “good practices manual” as tools, expressing its genealogy and cultural history : universalism of moral principles from the modern philosophy.

Both elements, one from the historical construction of bioethics and the other from that philosophical tradition, are intention. Plurality of discourses about good practices in science is becoming a productive polyphony, both considered as complex and as new wealth of our democratic societies. That polyphony seemed quite contradictory to the quest of unity and simplicity of moral principle, built on the idea that a moral imperative has to be one, simple and necessary to be operational and, above all, to be valid.

How are we to deal with both, quite contradictory dynamics in the bioethical perspective? How are we to build normative principles in order to guide and to control practices? Every disciplinary paradigm, every social actor, every regard seem legitimate to express in their own way but are still trying to fulfill a unique moral imperative. Bioethics has the interest to embody that tension between a polyphony of legitimate discourses and and a moral imperative quest, between the multiple and the unique, the hybrid and the pure.


 * Perspectives from the scientific field : considering the social world.

As we find out in our previous reflexions, the look of the outsiders of the scientific field on scientific practices and productions is now perceived as a richness and is progressively admitted and legitimate.

Citizens, jurists, sociologists, economists, politicians, people from consumers or patients' associations, NGO's are now entitled to claim a visibility on scientific practices and motivations. That claim came with discourses, recommendations and alerts.

My own presence in the Paris team in the IGEM competition is representative of that phenomenon : being a science studies sociologist on the team, having a “anthropological approach”, trying to enlighten ethical stakes. Scientists accept the presence of observers. What will be the feedback of that acceptance? Of that opening to the other, the outsider of the scientific community, the uninitiated?

We first have to come back to an a priori that will be only mentioned here because of its importance even if it is not at the heart of our reflexions : the historical influence of the uninitiated, the non scientists on the constitution of scientific knowledge, has always been important, even if invisible. In the pubs of London in the modern period (see Larry Stewart here ) or in the salon of the “Blue stockings” movement of the British aristocracy (see Eric Sartori here ), many invisible places and people are left out of the History of science but were active contributors in the production of knowledge. That contribution in invisibility is a way for us to perceive the broadness, the irregularity and the divergence of the multiple front line of science, creating a multiplicity of places, people, kind of expertise and practices to look at (see Dominique Pestre here ).

According to Marie-Angèle Hermitte (see ), in the 1970‘s, a "society of science and technology" (refering to any society where science and technology are the primary production resource) developed between the economy of knowledge under construction (weighing up knowledge, technology and sustainability as a new motor of the contemporary capitalism) and the risk society, considering that “we can't have one without the other”. That culture of science also has a new component, separating it from the idea of priceless progress, making its rise “spectacular” for the analyst : that society rests on “consent”. It is now admitted, encouraged and normalized to expose difficulties and risks linked to technological society, to admit that technological progress is not exempt from negative effects. That element will be important in our approach, because it culturally built up a new objective of the ethical perspective, adding to the objective of prevention (regarding established risks) an objective of precaution (adding the “probable” risks to its concerns). The new aspect of “consent” in our technological society regarding crisis, risks and the global consensus about the necessity to exit lead to the creation of a new people, composed of manufacturers, scientists, politicians, and citizens keeping their differences of opinion in order to create “social pact” to answer the new social and environmental imperatives. The risks associated with emerging technologies could reconfigure the social world, putting the promises, responsibilities and expertise of science and scientists at its center. The ethical questions in sciences and the new relations that it “imposes” between social actors can have some large effect and reconfigurations on the social world and democracy.

We have to take into consideration those uninitiated in the social debates, controversies and polemics nowadays about the technical and scientific decisions facing risks (nuclear waste, GMOs, infected blood). Controversies are special moments and situations where both uncertainty and divergences between actors are perceptible. These situations call scientists' monopoly into questions about what is the best way to resolve the “local” problem, leading to a more “global and conceptual challenge” by reopening the question of the “neutrality of science”. The legitimacy of the scientific decision about risks, and so the technical choice of politics usually based on these scientific decisions, are now disputed. Scientific and social controversies are a way to put into light the democratic aspects of the scientific decision-making process, focused on the question of the good way to “live together” (including the environmental question), that new social pact, where ethical perspective is at the center. We can also notice, referring to the work of Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe's (see ), that controversies are also regarded as a new way to practice a “dialogical democracy” in the decision making process, in some new “open spaces where groups can mobilize themselves to debate technical choices in which the public is involved”. As already proposed, the question of governementality, the scientific decision making process and democratic experimentation have to be considered in our reflexion.

As evidenced by our emphasis on the words “look” and“regard”, ethics is mainly about observation, looking before assessing. Importantly, in order to judge a situation, one needs to have access to it. That “look” on scientific production can be the look of the scientific community, the look of the outsider, the look of the judge, etc. Building ethical tools is also about building that observation, that special way to look at scientific production. I intend to create a dialogue between the “look”, the “regard” and the “speech” as the next step of this ethical perspective. That way, speech has to be thought almost as “action”, referring to the performative utterance, allowing us to consider it also in a critical perspective, by observing what kind of power, tensions and strategies are involved in a scientific debate that covers a multiplicity of social stakes.