Practices

Ethics

Ethics and how the iGEM community Should behave

When working with synthetic biology, we have the urgent need to question our own methods and seek solutions that are focused care and monitor our actions with a clear and correct target. However, as a scientific community, we do not have a clear model to follow regarding this issue.

iGEM ​​encourages teams every year to deepen in this subject and try to improve on the work that has been done, however, although ethics is not a subjective matter, lends itself to interpretations, even when analyzed the same points from as many socio-cultural perspectives, as happens with the iGEM teams.

Every year we witness new breakthroughs in our field, every year we have the opportunity to see how each member of the iGEM community contributes to push the boundaries of knowledge in Synthetic Biology, every year, it is possible to characterize new parts, new vectors and new chassis, and this forces us also to question further.

So the question arises: Where should we draw the line ?, What is the limit to what we can do? and How do we do right?

A few days ago, we read a comic in which a futuristic dystopian perspective on what will be showing the progress of synthetic biology

And it's very funny, and somewhat unrealistic, but shows a potential reality that can happen if you do not take care of our work and we take a position of full responsibility in our day to day.

You can then conclude that it is necessary that the synthetic biology community, and particularly iGEM, which represents the vast majority of those who work in this field, we have an outline to guide us and be our reference for this field.
Professional codes of ethics are a way in which a complete professional community can agree on ethical guidelines on which to follow for the situations. For this, Team BIOSINT_Mexico we stick to an idea:

Create a code of professional ethics for the iGEM community

To validate our idea, we conducted a survey, which was attended by many iGEM teams and asked about his opinion regarding our idea of ​​conceiving this project.

The answers were favorable, and the vast majority of the teams, supported our idea, albeit with some controversy involved. With the results of the survey, we decided to write the code taking into account the issues that teams thought they should be, and leaving aside those who did not receive much support in the response.

So our code consists of:

You can check it out by clicking the image above

Access link: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/5/5f/EthicsForSyntheticBiologyBIOSINT2015.pdf

Swedish code: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/7/7d/CodeSwedish.pdf

French code: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/2/2b/CodeFrench.pdf

Cooperation

This year, we had the opportunity to be in contact with many teams around the world, thanks to the Internet by contacting us.

We were able to answer several surveys, such as the Nankai Korea_U_Seoul and iGEM teams for their respective projects "712" and "iShare"

Also, to our Policy and Practices project, we asked several iGEM teams to answer a survey that evaluated the feasibility of our idea: A professional code of ethics for synthetic biology.

The teams that were helping us with this:

Technion-Israel

iGEM ​​Pasteur

iGEM ​​UNAH

WPI iGEM

Uniandes Colombia

Monterrey Tec-iGEM

iGEM ​​TecCEM

iGEM ​​Mingdao

CEM TEC HS iGEM

Manchester-Graz

iGEM ​​Stockholm

Thanks to all of you!

Furthermore, once it drafted the Code of Ethics, TecMonterrey helped us check and edit. But the work did not end there, but both teams also helped us to translate it into Swedish and French. You can review the codes of ethics in different languages ​​here

Spreading iGEM

This year as part of bringing iGEM to a much broader community from outside of our own school and city, we decided to go beyond our state borders and went to our neighboring state of Guanajuato.

The talk was given at the University of Guanajuato and an invitation was sent to professors from the most important Educational Institutions in the state of Guanajuato. There was a very good response from faculty members of the University of Guanajuato, IPN and UNAM León, where they showed very enthusiastic about the iGEM competition and about making a team.

After 2 weeks the faculty members that showed interest decided to join together in order to create an iGEM team made of the 3 institutions. We were happy to see that our talk was very productive because we not only helped spread the word about iGEM and synthetic biology, but we also contributed to the development of a new team in Mexico and in a state were iGEM was not very known. As of today we continue as advisors to the new forming team and we would love to see them in the next iGEM Competition!

The instructors made a great job selecting their team members and you can check their FB page on the next link! :
Facebook: IGEM Guanajuato