Team:Toulouse/ethics

The ethical questioning turned out to be one of the major starting points of our project. Acting on an established environment and modifying it is no mean feat and our thinking combines technical and philosophical point of views. The actual purpose of our project also leads us to undertake an ethical questioning about the role of the scientist regarding “useless” things such as the trees lining the Canal du Midi.

Protection of the beauty

Is it the scientists’ role to protect beauty?

Beauty is a feeling of satisfaction and is selfless. It is more a feeling than the property of a thing, this is not a notion we can clearly understand. Indeed, we can find something beautiful even when we don’t know the purpose of the object. There is always a distinction between natural beauty and artistic beauty according to Hegel, the famous author. The artistic beauty is born from our mind and our spirit: it is an element of signification of the work of art whereas the natural beauty of the object is external. In a way, the Canal du Midi combines both types of beauty: a natural one regarding the nature, the centenary plane trees but also an artistic one since the Canal was built by the human hands. Usually, scientists judge beauty as a superficial feature not deserving to undertake any kind of scientific efforts to maintain it. The traditional role of scientists is to solve global issues and to elaborate complex strategies in order to find useful solutions for everyone’s life. Once made this observation, one may wonder why synthetic biology would be used only to protect the useless beauty of a local heritage such as the trees lining the Canal du Midi.

This crucial interrogation leads us to consider science and synthetic biology in another way. What if the role of scientists was also to make people rediscovering the beauty of nature? What if the bases of new scientific challenges resulted from a more local scale? Science does not have to be elitist, it has so much to gain opening itself to these challenges. First scientifically, as research is never useless and as we never know the impact and the scope of our results. Then, socially as we could measure the deep interest raised by our project within the population and the media. Adopting a new vision of synthetic biology, we probably make people change their mind about this innovative discipline. The traditional cold objectivity of science distances itself from the society. Scientists are also beings capable of feeling the beauty, sensitive to the charm of landscapes and able to understand the usefulness of useless trees … The design of a strategy to protect useless beauty may seem senseless but we believe that it is also the scientist’s duty. Thus, it becomes essential to protect the beauty of this site.