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Team:Bologna/Human Practice
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Revision as of 15:41, 8 October 2009
| HOME | TEAM | PROJECT | SOFTWARE | MODELING | WET LAB | PARTS | HUMAN PRACTICE | JUDGING CRITERIA |
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F. J. Dyson
Ethics
Ethics is an important discussion topic especially in a Synthetic Biology context. For this reason, we scheduled a first meeting on the 6th of July to discuss about the ethical issues concerning synthetic biology and our project. The first concept that came out was that ethical principles are largely subjective, depending on religion, cultural environment and education. So, we thought that is more useful to fix global principles, generally admissible. Basing those principles on a self-regulation of transparency is also important. From this point, we distinguished two principal fields:
1) Ethical-Political
2) Ethical
Then, we developed other different aspects.
Safety: the condition of being protect against the possible consequences of any non-desiderable event. In particular, biological safety regards researchers, public and environmental safety;
Security: a set of preventive measures designed to reduce the risk of intentional removal (theft) of a valuable biological material;
Sharing or communicating projects and ideas without feel ashamed.
Social impact: the effect that an event has on the public opinion; this is also conditioned by possible misunderstandings.
Equality: sense of equal chance of accessing to resources and technology.
Considering the second field of reflection, ethics, we used a consequentialist perspective: it means that an action is proper if it is useful and morally right. So is important, before realizing an application, to foresee possible misapplications.
In order to apply these considerations to our project we thought that may be useful to prepare a questionnaire and submit it to other students or our families, trying to “measure” the mistrust or the fear that those people can feel about our project. If a large variety of people will answer to our question, we could be reasonably sure that our data are indicative of the impact of our project on the public opinion.
