Practices

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Spreading iGEM

Ethics

Ethics and how the community Should behave iGEM

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.
Images from google:analitics P
So our code consists of: