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

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<h3>Ethics</h3>
 
<h3>Ethics</h3>
 
<p>While providing this knowledge might lead to misuse, it has benevolent content. By publishing our obtained knowledge, we might inspire others to improve that sensor for the protection against date rape drugs, but also to build other biosensors detecting harmful substances in beverages in hindsight to our aim to provide a modular, extensible tool for the further creation of biosensors. In addition, our knowledge might raise the awareness of availability of the used chemicals in date rape drugs. This could ultimately lead to a more careful handling of beverages or even the overthought of legal obtainability and restriction of these chemicals, as we caused a broad discussion in the media. These findings lead to our ethical analysis in collaboration with experts from microbiology, law, sociology and ethics. Do the potential benefits of the publication of our results outweigh the potential risk? Since we are not providing knowledge how to synthesize or obtain these drugs, we still focus attention on these substances. Therefore, we decided to apply security risk assessment to our project.</p>
 
<p>While providing this knowledge might lead to misuse, it has benevolent content. By publishing our obtained knowledge, we might inspire others to improve that sensor for the protection against date rape drugs, but also to build other biosensors detecting harmful substances in beverages in hindsight to our aim to provide a modular, extensible tool for the further creation of biosensors. In addition, our knowledge might raise the awareness of availability of the used chemicals in date rape drugs. This could ultimately lead to a more careful handling of beverages or even the overthought of legal obtainability and restriction of these chemicals, as we caused a broad discussion in the media. These findings lead to our ethical analysis in collaboration with experts from microbiology, law, sociology and ethics. Do the potential benefits of the publication of our results outweigh the potential risk? Since we are not providing knowledge how to synthesize or obtain these drugs, we still focus attention on these substances. Therefore, we decided to apply security risk assessment to our project.</p>
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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">
 
<img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/e/e0/Bielefeld-CeBiTec_Dual-Use_Proposal-RiskAssessment.png"  width="500px">
 
<img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/e/e0/Bielefeld-CeBiTec_Dual-Use_Proposal-RiskAssessment.png"  width="500px">
 
<figcaption>Proposed Risk Assessment in every stage of the research progress</figcaption>
 
<figcaption>Proposed Risk Assessment in every stage of the research progress</figcaption>

Revision as of 12:49, 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.