Meetups:May LMU-Munich/Results

Workshops

SynBio Day

During the Meetup all the german iGEM Teams had the possibility to participate at Workshops. One of them was the discussion about a german wide SynBio Day. Since the agreement to one single day seemed quite difficult, the participants at the Workshop agreed to a german wide SynBio Week, which was scheduled to the second week of August. On one day in this week each team has the possibility to present their projects to the broad public of their home town. The idea behind a SynBio day is to inform and try to work against prejudges regarding Synthetic Biology. These aims could be achieved by talking head to head with all kinds of people on public places or making informative videos addressing aspects of Synthetic Biology in order to reach people via social media or the team wiki. Furthermore we planed on designing a survey in order to get an idea about the german public opinion on Synthetic Biology.

Stay tuned for more details.

Bioethics

In this group 15 students sat down together to discuss bioethical issues in the field of synthetic biology.

The first part of the discussion dealt with the question of how far synthetic biology should go and if limitations should be set. “Creation of life“ is one of the terms associated with synthetic biology. In contrast to classical biotechnology, where organisms are only partially modified, it aims to completely redesign and construct organisms analogously to devices in the engineering sciences. Despite advantages regarding biosafety, since safety mechanisms can be implemented during the construction process, the question of the limits arises. Fundamental ethical questions have to be addressed: how much influence may we take on our environment? Would the man-made creation of life lead to a new view of ourselves, analogously to Darwin’s theory of evolution? And would the new insights have a positive outcome or result in the depreciation of life and the decline of moral values?

Although questions being too big and complex to be answered in one afternoon by a group of students, different aspects and views mentioned led to a vibrant discussion. Also a general consensus could be drawn: studying the molecular and most basic principles of life should not be regarded as an attempt to take control over nature, but instead gives us a better understanding of life and the opportunity to obtain a new perspective of ourselves in a bigger context, leading to the appreciation of life, ourselves and society.

In the second part the question of how synthetic biology could change our society was addressed. The big potential of synthetic biology could have a huge impact on the energy, fuel and food industries. By implementing natural metabolic pathways into new organisms, industrial processes could be revolutionized and current problems, like our dependence on fossil fuels, solved. But with great power comes great responsibility: what are the socioeconomic effects? Is it possible to achieve a fair distribution of the goods and to prevent a too big influence of companies and the establishment of monopolies, so that society profits in the end?

The discussion of possible socioeconomic effects made up most of the time of the afternoon. Especially aspects of an open source vs. patent controlled field were discussed. With the former allowing cheap research and development and the latter enabling the funding of expensive and time-intensive projects and the secure income of inventors, the consensus in the group was that neither one nor the other system could be discarded in favour of the other. Instead, an alternative or hybrid system might be the most preferable scenario for the future. ¹

Since these aspects aroused high interest in the group we decided to establish a cooperation of the German iGEM teams in order to further investigate socioeconomic effects of synthetic biology, the associated responsibility and other important questions. For the cooperation we set different goals which include the review of the iGEM registry in regard of the license status of the parts, the establishment of an interest group for young academics in life sciences and the further investigation of the patent vs. open source issue.

¹ For further reading on this topic see: [http://www.nature.com/news/synthetic-biology-cultural-divide-1.15149 Bryn Nelson ‘Synthetic Biology: Cultural Divide ’, Nature 509, 152–154, 08 May 2014.]