Team:UCSC/Bioethics

Bioethics

In our project, there are certain moral concerns that we take the time to contemplate and address. Areas we examine include the following: Development - intellectual property, undergraduate research, and molecular biology techniques; Product - distribution, and geopolitical economics; Environment - climate, effects of growing a carbon source for fuel production, and effects of the current energy industry, and Biofuels - current uses and stigmas, competition between petroleum and biofuels, ethical issues about different biofuel production methods.

Development

We considered the autonomy of organisms such as H. Volcanii, intellectual property and patent agreements, GMO ownership, reasons for and against biofuel development, the ethics of biofuel use, and our role in the development of the next generation of biofuels. For interactions with any life form, there is the question of autonomy. In our project, we will be using H. Volcanii for a purpose other than what it performs in nature. We determined that it is not a violation of autonomy because cells are incapable of sentience and autonomy. Another aspect of development we looked into is GMO ownership. Current US patent laws dictate that no species or product naturally occurring can be legally owned. While this allows for the patenting of GMOs, it is not always best to do so. We determined that the potential usefulness and inevitable release of a fuel-producing archaea makes ownership of it unethical and ultimately impossible. And always, safety first. H. Volcanii was chosen because it requires a high salt environment to survive, it only survives in a solution up to 2% butanol, and, as an archaea, it is fundamentally different from bacteria and other natural microbes, so dangerous gene transfer is not a concern.

Project

When we focused on the product itself, we must consider carbon source, geopolitics, safety, and distribution. The proposed plants we will use are Arundo Donax and switchgrass, both of which grow quickly and in a variety of terrains. Growing large amounts of these plants as biomass for biofuel would enable a cycle of rapidly capturing and releasing recent carbon - in effect, carbon neutrality. Geopolitical concerns arise when it is brought up that in order to support the world’s energy usage on biobutanol alone, the area required to grow the plants would be the size of South America. Distribution of responsibility would also have to be talked about as countries may be specialized toward certain aspects of the process, such as possessing ideal land for growing the plants, having plentiful factories to process the biomass into butanol, and various other tasks.

Environment

When we examine our environment’s current state of affairs, we discover that our current CO2 emissions are excessive, the ocean is becoming more acidic and harming marine life, and the climate is changing and causing coastal displacement, extreme weather events, and negative agricultural impacts. These effects are predicted to last thousands of years if not prevented. We argue that humanity has a responsibility to itself to protect and sustain the Earth for our own best interests. If we keep pumping old carbon into our atmosphere, the results will be more catastrophic than the consequences we are already observing. Our solution to this is to achieve carbon neutrality by capturing carbon that is currently in the atmosphere, and using it to fuel our energy demands. This would greatly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and provide a better world for future generations.