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Ethical Lab Book

About ethics in our project

That talk was pretty important. We really had to make that ethical reflexions more “practical”, appreciating that questions in our own practices, our own habits, our own project. Different stakes were discuss during that talk, making it seems a bit messy, I'll try here to arrange it to make that stakes more obvious, I hope nobody in the team will mind about that kind of “over conceptualization” I'm about to do. We started that talk with a method I propose, a before/during/after evaluation of our own way to estimate the ethical parts of our project. What do we had in mind when we had to choose our project? What happened when we choose to work on vesicles? What happened then when the lab's manipulations started? What will happen after? What are we responsible for (in both senses) : by asking us questions at the time and by producing something in that iGEM's conditions? All that questions, put into that light, were quite delicate to handle... My own reading of that certain “caution” is that there is both factor of closeness and factor of distance from the ethical question at work in the team's mind. We try to enlighten that point at the end of that post.

"Before" : the ethical implication of the choice of a fundamental research project

The unrealistic perspective :

The choice of that “unrealistic” term has not to be read as a pejorative word. Unrealisticness is about “not wondering about a certain application”, but about something more global, that long distance communication system between bacterias. Unrealisticness is about “not decreeing now about reality”. Before choosing the message in a bubble project, during the brainstorming period, we wonder about a lot of different project which could be more “ethically fitted”, in particular when we were talking about biomedical projects.

It lead us to a question : is there some “favorable ground” for ethical reflexion? Why it seems so hard for us to “find” ethical questions to ask to our project? Why closeness to mankind seems to make ethical reflexions possible and relevant? To me, the way bioethics was culturally and historically built was to answer to pragmatical needs. After World War II, then with the “authority crisis of the 60's/70's”, the person, the individual, is put in the heart of ethical reflexion : giving him rights, conscious, “free and well-informed consent”, etc. That process, mainly lead by Americans thinkers in that pragmatical perspective, put the individual, the single, the man, at the crossing of all concerns. The issue was, at that time, about claiming that science and knowledge, even if necessary and “good”, couldn't be allowed to forget mankind in their process. What about ethical reflexion when there is so few man? So few reality? The way that point was express by the team was by certifying that our project was about fundamental research, and we don't believe in the application nowadays. The application is so, the moment, the instant when mankind is coming into the science process, when it is not anymore “science for science” as a “is this project possible?”, when you have to answer to other imperatives, and among it, ethical imperatives. That “science for science” period is close to a world of concept, of will, of future, of performances of knowledge and practices. Then, it is the crossing between two set of question : from “is this possible?” to “is this good?”.

Conceptualization of our project : “create a language”.

Our project is about communication between bacterias with OMVs, about building a framework which can be easily expanded to a lot of different inputs and outputs. As express by Christophe during the talk, we are not creating a practical tool, we are at the anterior and more meta level, trying to create and to control that communication system. Bacterias are thought through the metaphor of the transistor. That perspective, already defined as more “fundamental” than “applicative”, is also a new way to enlighten what can be a engineered approach of biotechnology : looking for a “ground work”, a “base” in the perspective to be used for some very different applications.

About the analogy with a communication system : is it ethically problematical?

I was personally wondering about that analogy with communication and computing. Is this a problem? Do we have to consider it ethically? Do “life” has to be treated as “mankind”? What kind of changes are we performing? Referring to the analytic philosophy of John Austin and it rewriting by the gender studies, reflexions about performativity ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity here]) and speech act ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act here]) could help us to ask a new question to our project : Does performativity has to be include in ethical reflexions? I think I was the one finding that question relevant, but I allow myself to tell a few words on it. Performativity and speech act are very useful tools to resolve the problem of that “fundamental” versus “applicative” perspectives. By saying that words are actually “doing thing”, the theoretical and practical perspectives are now joined in “real world”. By creating an analogy between communication, computing and life sciences, we are actually performing something, creating a new regard on bacterias, from now on tool to communicate. I really think that kind of performativity is really one of the most interesting point for social science studies and epistemology to look at synthetic biology. To the question which underlies that reflexion : “is that performativity ethically acceptable?” the team seems quite unanimous even if quite intuitive : sense and signification about what is “life” is always moving, by the research dynamics and discoveries in life science, it is not a problem, it is actually what “science is”.

"During" : A certain deviation about practices in science

By asking the “during the project” question, we were in a kind of deadlock. Nobody seemed to be “affected” by ethical questions during the project. Mankind is far away from our lab. So, we went to a more general question about the lab practices : “what can you accept?”, “what is your limit?”.

Lab : Accepting degrees in the manipulation in the team, the notion of scale.

We went round the table to know what was that limits, and what was the ethical stake of manipulating bacterias. It was pretty funny to ask the question of “animal rights” by the means of bacterias. The analogy with mankind was again the point. Everyone was referring to a limit that cannot be exceeded by similarity with mankind definition : to be a mammal, to have a nerve system, to have a brain. Soufiane bring a good point to the debate, by saying that one of the explanation of the fact that nobody really cares about what could happen to bacterias was that animals, mouses, even insect was a “unity”. We are in the scale's question : bacterias are regarded in colony, they're never perceived as a unity. Remembering what we already told about the birth of bioethics, we also can bring to our reflexion the fact that the question of individuality and its respect is one of the way to threat ethical question. When you face something which look more like a drop than a “being”, it is quite hard to consider it as something able to “afford” ethical perspective.

Modeling : “It's only a curve”

After asking that “lab” ethical question, we had to consider the second part of the project process : model-building. Can we ask ethical question to modeling? Does abstraction could be responsible for something? Of course, yes. Intuitively, if you are building a model to “killing a large group of people”, the ethical problems will appear very quickly. If we have in mind the work of Hannah Arendt about authority and bureaucracy, picking up the idea that procedures, protocols and organizational structures to manage activity can be a part of a certain disengagement of the actor's responsibility in the process.