Difference between revisions of "Team:KU Leuven/Practices/Ethics"

This ethics page is built on the ethical debate that was part of our symposium.
Definition of synthetic biology.
Before delving into ethical questions and the details of regulation it is crucial to understand what we are talking about when we use the term synthetic biology. Generally when five scientists are asked to define synthetic biology the answer will be five different definitions. What we heard during the symposium was:

On a closer all of these definitions consider human involvement to be a part of synthetic biology. For the first definition it is of course humans, who put biology on steroids. The second definition needs humans, who design biological circuits. The third definition has people from different field working together. And finally the last two ones have humans building biology.
At this point naturally the question arise. What should we build? What are the risks involved in the process? Safety regulation in synthetic biology. A first opinion is that safety regulation is definitely needed. One only needs to look at the thread posed by invasive species to local biodiversity around the globe to see that releasing new species into an ecosystem can be problematic.