Team:UNIK Copenhagen/Workshop

We hosted an ethics workshop for the Danish iGEM teams on the 21^st of August. We thank Nanna Kongsholm, Andreas Christensen and Sune Holm for making some great presentations embracking the topic of ethics and synthetic biology down to a level for someone not experienced in ethics and for giving us some tools for how to write an ethical essay. The workshop was really succesful and all the teams got to start discussing their ethics profile.

You can finde the program and abstracts for the presentations below.

Program:
9-9.10: Introduction: Brief presentations of iGEM projects
9.10-10: Philosophical approaches to ethical issues concerning new biotechnologies (Nanna Kongsholm)
10.10-11: Safety, risk and precaution (Andreas Christensen)
11.10-12: Writing an essay on ethical and societal issues in syntetic biology (Sune Holm)
12-13: Lunch
13-15: Group work for the iGEM competition with Nanna, Andreas, and Sune

Abstracts:
Philosophical approaches to ethical issues concerning new biotechnologies (Nanna Kongsholm)
How do we decide whether a new biotechnology is morally ’right’ or ’wrong’? Can a new biotechnology be ’right’ in one respect, and ’wrong’ in another? This talk will present three classical theories in moral philosophy, and show how they may be applied to the ethical discussion and evaluation of emerging biotechnologies.

Safety, risk and precaution (Andreas Christensen)
"Is it safe?" is possibly the most common question people ask about new technologies. The aim of this talk is to provide a better understanding of one important aspect of safety, namely uncertainty - the phenomenon that we do not know what will happen if we develop a technology or if we apply it in this or that way. We will focus on two issues:

(1) The different ways in which the outcome of an action - e.g. developing and using a new technology - can be uncertain, and the importance of not mixing them up.

(2) How society should deal with uncertainty - comparing two popular approaches, namely the 'Precautionary Principle' and Risk-Benefit Analysis.

Writing an essay on ethical and societal issues in synthetic biology (Sune Holm)
We look at some of the problems that are being discussed in relation to ethical and societal aspects of synthetic biology, introduce central arguments and concepts from bio- and environmental ethics, and consider how to write a concise discussion text on ethical and societal issues in synthetic biology.

Texts that may serve as background:
Ethical issues in synthetic biology: An overview of the debates. Parens, Johnston, and Moses.The Hastings Center, Garrison, New York, 2009

Social and Ethical Implications of Creating Artificial Cells. In Bedau and Parke The Ethics of Protocells: Moral and Social Implications of Creating Life in the Laboratory, MIT 2009.