Difference between revisions of "Team:Bielefeld-CeBiTec/Practices/DualUse"

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<a href="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/e/e0/Bielefeld-CeBiTec_Dual-Use_Proposal-RiskAssessment.png" data-lightbox="Proposedriskassessment" data-title="Proposed Risk Assessment in every stage of the research progress">
 
<a href="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/e/e0/Bielefeld-CeBiTec_Dual-Use_Proposal-RiskAssessment.png" data-lightbox="Proposedriskassessment" data-title="Proposed Risk Assessment in every stage of the research progress">
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<figcaption>Proposed Risk Assessment in every stage of the research progress</figcaption>
 
<figcaption>Proposed Risk Assessment in every stage of the research progress</figcaption>
 
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<h3>Risk assessment</h3>
 
<h3>Risk assessment</h3>
 
<p>The process of risk assessment as proposed by our team is conducted at every stage of our research. We do not aim for restriction or prohibition of research or progress, but for raising awareness and thereby minimizing the risk of misuse in a process of free and responsible science.</p>
 
<p>The process of risk assessment as proposed by our team is conducted at every stage of our research. We do not aim for restriction or prohibition of research or progress, but for raising awareness and thereby minimizing the risk of misuse in a process of free and responsible science.</p>

Revision as of 12:51, 18 September 2015

iGEM Bielefeld 2015


Dual Use

More than biosafety and biosecurity: Ethics, Laws and Guidelines

Overview

We decided to do an analysis of biosecurity, specifically the dual use issue of our project. While we were scanning the literature for information about our biosensor for detection of date rape drugs, we encountered many sensitive information about the accessibility and (chemical) synthesis of date rape drugs. Those information are publicly availably. Especially the publication of a freely available ingredient raised our concern. In our opinion, this knowledge can create a threat to the health of people, if it is misused.

Because iGEM is an open source competition, we might ourselves provide knowledge that could be of dual use. Since iGEM asks us to be striving to be conscientious members of the synthetic biology community, we informed ourselves about existing biosafety, biosecurity and dual use regulations.

We found the legal situation in Germany, the European Union and the USA to be inconsistent. In addition to these laws, many proposals from various advisory boards and non governmental organizations exist. We provide an overview about the proposals of these organizations and summarize various aspects of the ongoing ethical discussion about the opposing needs freedom of science and regulation of research with possible biosecurity issues. Therefore we contacted several experts from ethics committees, members of the German ethics council, a constitutional lawyer and a law student from the USA, as well as the iGEM safety committee itself. In fruitful discussions we obtained various opinions from different fields of expertise/from different academically point of views/from different perspectives.

We wondered, why we did not find any biosafety, biosecurity and dual use definitions within the iGEM safety page. iGEM offers many regulations and risk assessments concerning biosafety and provides a great infrastructure with its interdisciplinary expert team, the biosafety commission. We want to complete this biosafety and security aspects by finding guidelines for the safe distribution of information and the dual use in research. We propose the implementation of definitions in the safety page and questions aiming for biosecurity and dual use risk assessment in the obligatory safety forms. iGEM has a unique potential in reaching out in education of young researchers to contribute to a responsible research community.

We performed the risk assessment for our project, which, in addition to our public outreach and several expert contacts, influenced our project significantly. It broadened our horizon in the context of interdisciplinary collaboration and communication with the public - to build up to the trust put into us.

We believe, that iGEM can be a role model in raising awareness of biosecurity and dual use risks - for a better international collaboration to create beneficial knowledge.

We briefly summarize our findings on these pages. The detailed report is available as PDF.