Team:Vanderbilt/Practices/Bioethics
Ethics of Synthetic Biology: An Expert Perspective
With our project having so much potential to impact theoretically any biotechnology usage that it is applied to, we wanted to consider all sides of the story: looking not just at industrial and medical applications of mutation-optimization, but also to the potential ethical considerations surrounding its implementation. The ways that our mutation-optimization could be implemented are so numerous that its future is as unpredictable as progression of synthetic biology itself. Given these unknowns, we sought the perspective of bioethicists to see the ways- both good and bad- that our project's technological advancement to be used.
Dr. James Collins
Our iGEM team co-sponsored a question-and-answer session following Dr. Collins' seminar, where we invited students to ask Dr. Collins about his thoughts on some of the broader questions of conducting responsible research. There were many questions from the audience, and Dr. Collins did an excellent job at conveying some of the ethical difficulties of navigating these genetic technologies. To start a genuine conversation, Dr. Collins also asked many of his questions to the audience, made up off a diverse group of students from multiple academic backgrounds. Some of the topics included were:
- the ethics of modifying the genomes of human embryos with CRISPR/Cas9
- Ecological risk of genetically modified crops
- Safety of "gene drives" and the possibility of unintended consequences
- Risk that mutations pose to safely implementing genetic engineering
As Dr. Collins noted at the end of our event, "these questions are not easy to answer. Many of them may not even have simple answers. That is why I am trying to start us thinking about these issues, and where these new [genetic] technologies may be leading us".
After our event with Dr. Collins, our team joined Dr. Collins for dinner, where we continued the conversation on bioethics and asked for his thoughts on our project to reduce mutation. Dr. Collins was enthusiastic about the potential of the benefits that our breakthrough could bring the field. One application Dr. Collins immediately honed in on was use in conjunction with engineered genes released into environment. There, Collins noted, there is very high danger that existing containment strategies like killswitches could fail if even a single organism has its killswitch mutated.
Vanderbilt University is fortunate to have among its faculty one of the leading thinkers in terms of the ethics and potential future of bioengineering. Professor Michael Bess has made significant academic contributions to a number of fields, including seminal work on twentieth century history and the Green Revolution as the Chancellor’s Professor of History at Vanderbilt and a Guggenheim Fellow. More recently, Professor Bess has been focusing his research on the relationship between technology and society, work for which he has won a fellowship from National Human Genome Research Institute. In addition to numerous articles on the subjection of biotechnology and bio-enhancement, professor Bess is the author of the upcoming book Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future (Beacon Press).
Among the key issues that professor Bess raises in his book is whether or not society as a whole has fully considered the future consequences that these technologies may have, or if the pace of technologies like genetic engineering has exceeded society's capacity to prepare for and evaluate the dramatic changes these technologies could bring. In a series of conversations with professor Bess, we discussed both broader ethical issues in genetic engineering, as well as how our mutation-modifying technology could be applied. One of the most intriguing topics that came up was the possibility of using our sequence-optimization algorithms in respect to cancer.
Since all cancers originate with somatic mutations, it is difficult to ignore this hypothetical use of our technology. The oncogenes responsible for causing millions of cancers each year could be made more resistant to mutation. Intrigued by this possibility, our team has research mutation hotspots in p53, which are found in 70% of all lung cancers and 60% of all colon cancers. In the literature, there has already been demonstrated a near-complete correlation between p53 mutation hotspots and sites of UVB pyrimidine dimers (Drouin and Therrien 1997). Our software calculated that it is possible to reduce the number of these UVB pyrimidine dimer sites by over 40% in the human p53 gene, which given the correlation between these sites and the mutations responsible for human cancers, would likely bring about a substantial decrease in the incidence of oncogenic mutation.
