Reductionism in Synthetic Biology, an ethical issue

The survey on reductionism in synthetic biology can be found here: Survey. Feel free to fill it in, your contribution is very welcome.

Approach

How do the public and the scientific community feel and think about life-related questions and the reductionism approach in biology? This is difficult and always has been difficult. But now that we are directing evolution and trying to artificially create life, we have come to a point at which we need to discuss these issues. We will never get a clear answer on philosophical questions such as, "what is life?", even the scientific community is much too homogeneous for that. Still, a discussion to raise awareness and make us think about these questions could help in the debate on whether researchers should pursue the controversial goals that are present in synthetic biology. Furthermore, communication to the general public should be much easier if an overview of the different believes and opinions within the scientific community are available.

A qualitative and quantitative analysis on the opinions of researchers on reductionism in synthetic biology, could be achieved by approaching many people in this particular field of science (mostly iGEM supervisors and participants). To pursue the quantitative analysis, I would like to invite as many iGEM teams as possible to complete a short questionnaire.

The survey on reductionism in synthetic biology can be found here: Survey.

Interesting links

Synthetic biology in general
Pleiss, 2006
Benner, 2005
McDaniel and Weiss, 2007
Andrianantoandro, 2006
European Commission, 2005
Deplazes, 2009

Ethics in synthetic biology
Gorman, 2006
Tucker, 2006
Parens, 2006
Church, 2005
Samuel, 2009
Balmer, 2008
Boldt, 2008
Mitra, 2009

Reductionism
Benner, 2003
Caplan, 2008
Cho, 1999
Conner, 2008
Caplan
Clark, 2000
Pace, 2009
Short, 1997
Regenmortel, 2004
Agapakis, 2009
The hasting centre, 2008
Calvert, 2008
Peterson, 2001
Check, 2002
Ray, 1993