Difference between revisions of "Team:Vanderbilt/Practices/Collaborations"

Ethics of Synthetic Biology: An Expert Perspective As our team was developing our project ideas at the beginning of the year, we had the tremendous fortune to meet with Dr. James Collins from Arizona State University, who was giving a special seminar at our university. Dr. Collins is the former Director of the Population Biology and Physiological Ecology program at the National Science Foundation and the current Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment at Arizona State University, where he studies evolution and extinction in natural ecosystems. Recently, Dr. Collins has become involved in questions of synthetic biology and how it relates to responsible ethological and ethical practice. He was a lead author on the recent report Creating a Research Agenda for the Ecological Implications of Synthetic Biology, where he has raised some important yet under-emphasized questions in the potential effects that genetic technologies could have on the stability of natural ecosystems. Dr. Collins has been trying to start a dialogue in the synthetic biology community about new advances like "gene drives", which may have the potential to drive entire species into extinction. While these technologies may have enormous potential in preventing malaria, as Dr. Collins noted in his seminar, there are some significant ethical questions that need to be carefully considered. Our iGEM team co-sponsored a question-and-answer session following Dr. Collins' seminar, where we invited students to ask Dr. Collins about his thoughts on some of the broader questions of conducting responsible research. There were many questions from the audience, and Dr. Collins did an excellent job at conveying some of the ethical difficulties of navigating these genetic technologies. To start a genuine conversation, Dr. Collins also asked many of his questions to the audience, made up off a diverse group of students from multiple academic backgrounds. Some of the topics included were: -the ethics of modifying the genomes of human embryos with CRISPR/Cas9 -Ecological risk of genetically modified crops -Safety of "gene drives" and the possibility of unintended consequences -Risk that mutations pose to safely implementing genetic engineering As Dr. Collins noted at the end of our event, "these questions are not easy to answer. Many of them may not even have simple answers. That is why I am trying to start us thinking about these issues, and where these new [genetic] technologies may be leading us". After our event with Dr. Collins, our team joined Dr. Collins for dinner, where we continued the conversation on bioethics and asked for his thoughts on our project to reduce mutation. Dr. Collins was enthusiastic about the potential of the benefits that our breakthrough could bring the field. One application Dr. Collins immediately honed in on was use in conjunction with engineered genes released into environment. There, Collins noted, there is very high danger that existing containment strategies like killswitches could fail if even a single organism has its killswitch mutated.

/p>