Team:Exeter/Human Practices/biosecure

Publicly Available Data

Publishing findings that are freely available is imperative for both the iGEM competition and the charitable funding body that we are funded by, the Wellcome Trust. There is a great ethos surrounding iGEM that open source coding is incredibly important, allowing fruitful international collaborations based on BioBricks deposited in a publicly available database. The Wellcome Trust has applied rules making results freely available within six months of the date of publication, from 2007, but for any articles or papers published from the 1st of October 2009 onwards, final grant payments will be withheld with immediate effect if their findings fail to be publicly available. Therefore making our technology publicly available is essential.

Freely Available Data vs. Data Mis-Use

With open access in mind, our meeting with Dr. Sabina Leonelli raised the initial question of: how could data or methods from our iGEM project be used inappropriately when made publicly available? There is currently a huge debate at the moment about censoring science in the name of biosecurity and Sabina quickly introduced the concept of “dual-use” to us. Dual-use highlights the positive and negative effects that a technology or product may have on society. In our iGEM project, this could be the creation of bespoke polysaccharides to potentially revolutionise vaccine production and bespoke polysaccharide manufacturing, or a technology to allow someone to design capsular polysaccharides and increase the pathogenicity of strains. However, we learnt from our Human Practices Panel that actually there would be no route to the development of such a weapon. Polysaccharides themselves are not responsible for disease; it is the attachment to lipid A in forming lipopolysaccharides (LPS) that causes virulence, as it is the lipid A core which is entirely responsible for its toxicity, both in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Escherichia coli. If LPS assembly can be disabled, then the production of polysaccharides using our technology cannot be used as a biological weapon, because of the instability and lack of survivability characteristics of our genetically engineered E.coli in the environment, or as a chemical weapon due to this disabling strategy. We considered all options of preventing mis-use by us and others both in our meetings with Sabina and after the panel, and we believe this is a sufficient strategy to combat biosecurity and data mis-use of our technology.

The production of non-biological and non-chemical hazardous polysaccharides will clearly alleviate issues over biosecurity and the environment, but what other environmental issues did we identify and consider?