Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg/Ethics

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Ethics

For this project the suggested final product is a modified yeast strain that has higher resistance for irradiation. The product is meant to be used in chemostats in the industry (e.g. brewing or biofuel production) or in academic research.

We have asked our selves: What consequences will our product have if it got out on the market? Since the product may be used in industries and later on in products for public use we wanted to know what the public thinks about GMO products. This is the reason why we made a survey about what the public in Gothenburg and the scientists at Chalmers thinks about GMO and the areas of use for it. The survey has also been made by the Czech Republic team for the public in Prague.

GMO is an area that wakes a lot of feelings, and almost everyone has an opinion about it. There is an ongoing discussion about GMO in food, where the public in general often thinks that GMOs are not ok to use, but the scientists mostlyhave the opposite opinion and say that GMOs have been used in one way or another for decades and not harmful for humans (Solli, Bach, & Åkerman, 2014). Even if scientists says that the products are safe, 67% of the European citizens think that we should not develop genetically modified food (Solli, Bach, & Åkerman, 2014).

In the EU, there are strict rules for food that is genetically engineered. For example, all food that has in some way been modified has to be labeled. This is partly because of the risk of non-modified food potentially being “contaminated” with modified food (Ahmed, 2002) and partly because of the big concern of the public (Nicolia, Manzo, Veronesi, & Rosellini, 2013). It has been shown that genetically engineered crops are safe to use and aren’t harmful to human, and lower the amount of chemicals that are used on the fields. Even so there are only three crops with genetically modifications that are allowed in the EU (Nicolia, Manzo, Veronesi, & Rosellini, 2013). This can be compared to the US where already 15 years ago 60% of all produced food contained some kind of modification (Ahmed, 2002).

We can see in our survey that the public was significantly less in favor of GMO compared to academics. We believe that one reason for the public's mistrust in GMO products and research is based on lack of knowledge. People don’t like things they don’t know anything about, and that is one reason for why it is important to start talking about these things in school. Education is often the best way to give people a correct image of the situation and to make them see the possibilities with the technology. There have been conducted a lot of studies among high school students about their knowledge of biotechnology and what they think about GMO. It seems like the majority of high school student around the world does not know what biotechnology is, but they are in general at least a bit optimistic about GMO as long as it does not involve animals (Usak, Erdogan, Prokop, & Ozel, 2009). There is also a survey that shows that people in the US don’t see the difference between genetically engineered food and food that contains DNA ( Lusk & Murray , 2015). We decided to do something about that lack of knowledge and got in contact with high schools around Gothenburg.

One ethical problem that is directly connected to our project is that we are constructing a yeast strain that is more resistant to radiation than natural ones. This means that if it got out into the wild, the yeast could be harder to get rid of and could compete with the natural organisms. We have taken that in consideration and have in addition to the repair-system created a Safety Switch that is glucose dependent. This safety switch will kill the cell if it doesn’t have constant access to glucose.

References:

Lusk, J., & Murray , S. (2015). Food Demand Survey. Department of Agricultural economics, 2(9). Ahmed, F. (2002). Detection of genetically modified organisms in foods. Trends in Biotechnology, 20(5). Esteban, D., & Holloway, K. (2015). Mad dogs, vampires and zombie ants: A multidiciplinary approach to teaching neuroscience, behaviour and microbiology. The Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Ed. Nicolia, A., Manzo, A., Veronesi, F., & Rosellini, D. (2013). An overview of the last 10 years of genetically engineered crop safety. Informa healthcare. Solli, A., Bach, F., & Åkerman, B. (2014). Learning to argue as a biotechnologist: disprivileging opposition to genetically modified food. Cult Stud of Sci Educ. Usak, M., Erdogan, M., Prokop, P., & Ozel, M. (2009). High School and University Students’ Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding Biotechnology. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology education, 37(2).