Ethics

    The simple exercise of reading and talking through some of the wider socio-political and ethical issues amongst fellow iGEM peers does a lot to benefit the field. If we begin now to work on developing ourselves as scientists and engineers who can relate our work to a bigger picture, it will only serve to benefit our research community and our society at later stages of synthetic biology’s development.
    Of course, there are many avenues to go down to take human practices projects further – do some pubic outreach by visiting schools or community centres to talk about synthetic biology; make questionnaires for members of the synthetic biology community or wider circles in your university, city or country; think carefully about how to build in safeguards into your projects and then make sure you’re able to talk about it clearly to lay audiences as well as to peers in the field. This is another reason why we are excited about coming all together at the jamboree, as it is an ideal opportunity for discussion and debate around the aforementioned issues. We believe that as the next generation of synthetic biologists – and hopefully as the generation who will really be transferring the products of synthetic biology into society – it is essential for us to consider human practices of synthetic biology as an inherent part of our work!     When designing our 2009 iGEM drug delivery system The E.ncapsulator, we were faced with the issue of ingesting genetically modified organisms. In fact, our system uses Escherichia coli to produce a curative polypeptide. The bacteria then auto-encapsulate in a coat of sugars which will subsequently allow the produced polypeptides to arrive intact to the gut. The third module is when the bacteria over-express a set of restriction enzymes. This has the effect of killing the bacteria by making destroying their entire DNA. Without their DNA, the bacteria are unable to produce the proteins that enable them to survive and therefore die, leaving behind a bag full of the curative polypeptides.
    This third module was consciously added to the E.ncapsulator system in order to ensure that no living, genetically modified bacteria would be ingested. This module was the result of discussion among the team about the issues surrounding genetically engineered organisms, their ingestion and the risks involved. {{Imperial/09/TemplateBottom}}