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From 2012.igem.org

Free the frogs!

Why should ethics concern animals?

We will present three ways of integrating animals in our moral community with the different consequences drawn for animal experimentation. The two firsts authors, Tom Regan and Peter Singer are generally considered as classics or foundations of animal ethics, the third author, Martha Nussbaum, retained our attention because her attention for animals is embedded in broader theory of economy and ethics, inspired by the Nobel Prize of Economy (1998) Amartya K. Sen.

Ethics is about justice

Tom Regan and The Case for Animal Rights

Tom Regan is the most radical of the three authors we will present.

Peter Singer and Animal Liberation

“The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been with-holden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But they were otherwise, what could it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” [1]

Martha Nussbaum and Capabilities

These three approaches of animal ethics, despite their differences, have in common to emphasize on the political aspect of the animal question. Taking seriously animals as beings that deserve a moral care implies changing many of our habits of consumption. These required changes are quite close in their quality to those recommended by many ecological theories: being less excessive and more attentive to the world in which we are living. All this get quite interesting if we rapidly sum-up the ambition of animal ethics and ecology: making life better, one being at a time. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Animal biotechnology and human/non human relationships

Melvin Kranzberg, professor of history of technology and founder of the Society for the History of Technology, reached posterity through the formulation of six laws concerning technology which he called “The Kranzberg’s laws” . We will use the first law as a starting point on the relation of animal biotechnology and ethics. The first law states: “technology is neither good nor bad; nor it is neutral” . This statement is crucial to be well understood by engineers and bioengineers, one can’t state that technology is neutral. Once we are bringing new artifacts or entities into the world we can’t declare that we don’t have any responsibility of what will be done thanks to them or because of them. Technology is generally presented as a solution to a problem and most of biotechnologies could be said to be produced in the same state of mind, making the world better. This will be, at least, the way they will be presented to the public. This aim of technology has many impacts on our ways of being. It changes our relation to time, space and society (through clocks, trains and social-networks), it gives us the possibility to be related to any part of the world and organizing international contests with real-time communication through internet.

It also profoundly modifies our relationships with nature. Nature, which was once declared as an enemy, a dangerous force threatening the human race, is now more and more perceived as something sacred that has to be preserved from huge disasters occasioned by human technology. Fears concerning environmental changes and the disappearance of the world we knew are leading to this extreme. From one extreme (paying no attention to significant others) and another (paying so much attention that we want to keep them in formalin), an intermediate solution, pragmatic, made of compromises, have to be found.

However synthetic biology is still building itself on strongly anthropocentric values. These values are stated in the first fundamental canon of the American Society of Civil Engineers' Code of Ethics : "Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public and shall strive to comply with the principles of sustainable development in the performance of their professional duties." The attention to the principles of sustainable development was added in 2009, as explained in the footnote of the document. This novelty is quite important as it highlights the need of an evolution of our relation to non-human beings. The environmental crisis and maybe pressure from society compels technology to care for a "sustainable develoment". Synthetic biology appears to have in mind a quite similar understanding of ethics. Ethics is widely link with safety and security, with the issues of bioterrorism and the avoidance of environmental leaks. The formulation of the human pracice on the iGEM site also encourages this conception: "Will the world be a safe place if we make biology easy to engineer?". Those questions of environmental safety and risk assessment are quite difficult to deal with, and we are glad to see that the project of Paris Bettencourt was to take them seriously through a study of horizontal gene transfer. It seems to be too often taken as granted with some killer switch assumption.

But imporoving human welfare from an anthropocentric perspective can have for consequences a deep blindness of the environment in which we are embedded. The history of animal ethics testifies of the limits of a blind fulfillment of human diseres. The animal issue was triggered in UK by Ruth Harrison’s book, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry published in 1964. From this book rises a campaign against industrial farming giving birth in the early 70s to the concept of “speciesism”, and slogans around “animal liberation” “animal rights”. The main works structuring the animal movement were published between 1975 and 1983; Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and Tom Regan’s Animal Rights and Human Obligations (1976). The Case for animal rights (1983). The renewal of the attention of animal, though imposed to the practice by laws and ethical commitees, is not necessary integrated in the scientific reflection. A closer look at stories of “new” animals brought into living reveals that our responsibility concerning those beings isn’t well established at all. Raphael Larrère tells the story of two hybrids, Agrostis, a transgenic crop, and Lucifer, a transgenic and cloned bull. The story of Lucifer tells something that we need to be well aware of as we decide to make living being and specifically animals easier to engineer. It also reminds that the questions raised by synthetic biology are not new. Biotechnologies As technologies/biotechnologies shape the world we live in, shape the society we live in, they also shape ethics. [3] Technologies progressively address new ethical needs, as can be seen in the fifty last years. Animal ethics is an instance among many others, nearly insignificant comparing to all that has been thought after the second world concerning nuclear or the development of bioethics since the early nineties (Bioethics has for object what can or can’t be done to human. It is not turned towards animals.)

Some of the members of the team think that synthetic biology gives us the possibility to renew our relation nature. By putting animals and bacteria at the center of our system of production we could make people more conscious of the implications of some excessive ways of living. To some respect, synthetic biology would be creating new symbiosis. Here comes the original formulation of this idea:

"To me, modifying frog or other organisms is not a way of controlling them, neither it is against the laws of nature (if it were, they would die anyway). To me, it is a was to develop a new symbiosis, which imply interdependency. In this setting, mankind will depend on these organisms, and will have to treat them well. People usually don't think of the dependence on animals synthetic biology creates, they only think about control (anthropocentric view). But I prefer being dependent on Bioengineered frogs, rather than on very polluting (and invisibly polluting and destructing) industries thousands miles from me. In a way, and counter-intuitively, synthetic biology would make us closer to nature and ecosystems..."