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Team:HZAU-China/Humanities/ethics
From 2014.igem.org
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Ethics
A Theoretical 4-D Model: Paradigm Designed for Future iGEMers to Analyse Ethical Problems in Synthetic Biology
by Li Fuyao
College of Economics and Management, HZAU
In this part we:
1 Motivation
Evolution is a process which has a direction that begins in the coded genes of life itself and looks into the nebulous fog of tomorrow. Evolution is a faithful companion of time itself, which we could not see the future, but only the present and past of. Its direction can be traced back but can hardly be predicted, and it is a direction as old and unfathomable as time itself. Nature dictates the direction of evolution with no emotion; but when this direction intersects with the welfare of humans, however, it is tinged with the human perception of good or evil, right or wrong, is or ought. Especially when it's no longer nature who inflicted this direction upon evolution.
As has been discussed in the preface, artificial evolution is synthetic biology in hindsight. Hindsight here means not intentional when doing but happened after all. What synthetic biologists are doing is not intentional interference in the evolution process, but not being intentional is not enough, it doesn't mean we shouldn't address them.
Talking about good and evil in such a rush might seem childish, but sometimes children's simple dichotomy might enlighten us on an easy cut-through to an otherwise complex issue. Topics such as good, evil, right, wrong, is, or ought in relation to synthetic biology can contain a book-worth of contents if you choose to look at them the complex way, which certainly will prove very productive; for in an ethic jigsaw, we ultimately will need all the tiny pieces. Teams such as iGEM Paris 2009 have done impressive works in this, and their previous works have given us great inspiration.
However, after contemplating upon the ethical concerns about our project, we discovered a relatively simple approach to tackle the ethics problems in synthetic biology, and we would like to share it with everybody. Paradigm might sound a bit pretentious actually, and since we built this model from scratch, it certainly has many imperfections, so, just regard it as a bit of experience sharing! We hope future iGEMers could find it somewhat useful, and innovate more ideas on how to think about an ethic problem in synthetic biology.
And here is our ethics report, enjoy!
