Team:KU Leuven/Practices/Ethics
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:
“Synthetic biology is the biological analog to what happened in the semiconductor industry its biology going from the analysis phase to the design phase.”
“Synthetic biology is a brand, which brings biologists and people from other fields together. (Non biologists are the steroids).”
“Synthetic biology is man made biology.”
“Synthetic biology is the construction of cells from the bottom up.”
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.
Contact
Address: Celestijnenlaan 200G room 00.08 - 3001 Heverlee
Telephone n°: +32(0)16 32 73 19
Mail: igem@chem.kuleuven.be
