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From 2012.igem.org

Should we meet Xenopus again in iGEM ?

This article doesn’t reflect the opinions of the whole team, however those questions were debated and no consensus were fully accepted. This dividing topic was represented by our T-Shirts: some of us believed that the term chassis should be maintain, as a mark of the identity of synthetic biology and it’s engineering methodology. Others believe that it should not be kept, for the various reasons said through this investigation: the term chassis does not seem epistemologically or ethically relevant. The evolution of technology may be going too fast regarding the human capacity to use it wisely. We think we live in excessive societies, blindly consuming natural goods and hardly mastering all the technology existing around us. In those conditions, the race to innovation and novelty is likely to bring new excesses creating new problems. Developing business dealing with the consequences of our excesses can’t be a sustainable solution... This human practice had for ambition to challenge the usual conception of beings in synthetic biology through the case of the toad Xenopus tropicalis. It was an occasion to deal with theories that rarely enters in the laboratory because they are mostly upheld by opponents to synthetic biology or revolutionary technoscience (the development of synthetic biology is quite similar in communication as the one of nanoscience, except for one remarkable thing: synthetic biology opened its doors to embedded humanities).