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From 2012.igem.org

Freed 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.

Tom Regan and The Case for Animal Rights

Peter Singer and Animal Liberation

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.