Team:TU Eindhoven/Synergene/Introduction

Introduction Synenergene

During our iGEM project we collaborated with the Rathenau Institute and the RIVM (Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment) to analyze some ethical problems related to our project. The Rathenau institute supervised us while working on the Synenergene project. We were asked to think about the applications of our project and the possible outcomes of those applications. Might some applications of our project raise ethical questions that needed to be discussed before it is used? Can some positive changes cause new problems? These are some of the questions we asked ourselves during the summer. In order to investigate and try to answer some of these questions, we wrote an application scenario and described some of the possible outcomes in three Techno-Moral Vignettes. While working on these pieces our view on our own project dramatically changed. New possible applications came to mind as well as new ethical issues and questions. Together with the Rathenau Institute we were able to tackle some of these questions and have a discussion about these questions with policymakers from the RIVM. For more information about that discussion click here.

The end deliverables for this collaboration are a written application scenario, three written techno-moral vignettes and the visualization of one of those vignettes. When the iGEM project has been completed, another one of the techno-moral vignettes will be visualized due to a request from the Rathenau institute. This vignette will be used in their upcoming workshops on synthetic biology.