Bioethics

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke

An often used and very famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke, his so called third law. The great thing about this quote is that it captures the essence of why modern biotechnology is perceived - by some at least - as a strange and slightly scary concept. Scientists have for the last 40 to 50 years invented, produced and gained so much from the field of biotechnology that the world as we know it today could not exist were it not for our technological advances, though this can be said for many technologies.

But it is not only the advancements in technology that allow us to do the crazy experiments that the iGEM competition produces, but also that the teaching/education of biotechnological methods has been effectivised by for example the partsregistry page or openwetware. It has become easier to understand many different concepts and methods due to the nature of freely available literature and protocols online.

In this years iGEM competition, we joked around with the idea of being mad scientists hell bent on world domination. This was of course just fun and games we had in the wee hours of the night in the lab. But what was really to stop us or any one else from designing potentially harmful organisms.

The thing about creating and modifying organisms is that it is not an easy process. Of course, handling the lab machines, finding the right protocols and knowing what to do when and where is no longer that difficult thanks to the wonders of the internet and the evolution of biotechnology. But as everybody who have ever worked with genetic modification know, nothing ever works quite right on the first try and it usually takes many trials and errors before you have a working construct.

If you really were hell bent on destroying the world, making a deadly virus or bacteria would take far too long, require too many resources (money, machines, reagents, expertise, time etc.)

Our view on this subject is this: People who really want to do harmful actions to others, would with the highest probability not go through the difficult process of creating a bio hazardous organism, when they could more easier go to the local hardware store and buy all the necessary equipment to create a bomb.

The idea of creating a organism which could potentially get harmful, has always been a consideration in the iGEM competition. That is why there is such great a focus on introducing a kill-switch to all systems with BioBricks.

You could argue against, that with an open source community like iGEM and ordering of bio-parts from Partregistry, there would be a greater availability for people with unethical or immoral opinions to cause harm. But as mentioned earlier, it is a too complicated process and there is normally integrated a kill-switch in the organisms, as a form of safety.