Team:Uppsala/HP/Gold Integrated
Introduction
Welcome to our Ethics page! In iGEM Uppsala we believe that discussing and thinking about ethics in science is extremely important. That is why we chose it as our main part for HP. We asked about opinions about ethics and iGEM in Interview . We also ask general public and other iGEM teams in Event. Out of that we created Guidelines for other iGEM teams. Within these guidelines you can find four chapters about the main issues we identified. You can also use our handy list of questions that we think every iGEM team should answer before starting their project! You can also see how we integrated this knowledge into our own project in Integrated. In Education you can see our events that links to our Ethics part of the project. To see the rest of our HP work to our main HP Page
Guidelines
We compiled questions that every iGEM team should answer before starting their work to make sure they are doing their best possible work. We first started to answer these questions while creating our project. Later on we worked on perfecting them by talking to lawyers, ethics experts, our teamates, other teams and the general public. From that we compiled four chapters about ethics and a list of question we believe everyone should answer before starting their project. You can read the whole booklet here .
Interviews
To learn more about synthetic biology, ethics and iGEM we decided to interview Mirko Ancillotti form Ethics department at Uppsala University.
Do you think this is a good way to reach out to other teams and get them to talk about what kind ethical problems that can occur during iGEM?
Yes, I think that the booklet is a very good tool to inform and stimulate awareness about the basic ethical issues revolving around the iGEM competition and GEM products.
What do you think is important to consider (ethically) when starting up/working on a project?
Ethics issues arise in many areas of research, and the kind of considerations needed at the beginning of and through an ethnographic study differ from the considerations due in a study involving animal research. However, some ethical requirements are common to all research fields. I can try to pinpoint some of them. First of all, the research must be valuable for society, i.e., it has to be reasonably expected to bring about some kind of improvement (directly or by increasing knowledge, even if such knowledge does not have immediate practical consequences). Thus, the very first question a researcher should ask herself is: ‘is this research needed?’. If the answer is yes, the it is a matter of how to perform it. To be valuable, a research need to be scientifically accurate. Therefore, a methodologically rigorous design, the involvement of competent parties, honest scientific conduct and ‘acceptance’ of results (even if negative) are required. Doing otherwise can lead to the production of wrong and/or unreliable results and, ultimately, to a waste of resources. There should also be a favourable risk-benefit ratio. For instance, in the case of research involving human beings or animals this means that what the subjects are subjected to, should somehow be compensated by the expected gain for themselves and/or the society. ·
How do you best lead an ethic discussion during a project that is controversial?
Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any ethical discussion technique which is considered to be the best. However, I think that it is worth highlighting at least one requirement that should be fulfilled in order to have an ethical discussion. While we all have thoughts and opinions, the capacity to successfully express one’s own viewpoints on ethical matters is not possessed by everybody. Saying ‘this is my opinion’ may not suffice. Students (and not only them) need training in ethics so to be able to appreciate the ethical issues involved in a project and to learn to discuss through tenable arguments.
What do you think is important to think about while doing an iGEM project?
I think that the ethical requirements suggested for when starting up/working on a project can provide a good framework to think about an iGEM project as well. I would like to focus on the requirement of the favourable risk-benefit ratio. In iGEM projects, there are no humans or animals involved. Only microorganisms. As you rightly pointed out in the booklet, researchers must think ahead and ‘be able to produce a thought-through statement about the future usage of the product’. The reason is that the potential risks involved may be particularly hard to foresee (e.g., interactions in the environment) and be linked to misuse and dual use practices in connection with the knowledge produced by the iGEM projects. In case of controversial projects (higher risks), the expected benefits should be superlative.
Do you think iGEM-team should discuss ethical problems about their project or is this something that is unnecessary?
I think that iGEM teams should discuss the ethical issues involved in their project. It is both a necessary practice and a good exercise.
Do you think this is a good way to reach out to other teams and get them to talk about what kind ethical problems that can occur during iGEM?
Yes, I think that the booklet is a very good tool to inform and stimulate awareness about the basic ethical issues revolving around the iGEM competition and GEM products.
What do you think is important to consider (ethically) when starting up/working on a project?
Ethics issues arise in many areas of research, and the kind of considerations needed at the beginning of and through an ethnographic study differ from the considerations due in a study involving animal research. However, some ethical requirements are common to all research fields. I can try to pinpoint some of them. First of all, the research must be valuable for society, i.e., it has to be reasonably expected to bring about some kind of improvement (directly or by increasing knowledge, even if such knowledge does not have immediate practical consequences). Thus, the very first question a researcher should ask herself is: ‘is this research needed?’. If the answer is yes, the it is a matter of how to perform it. To be valuable, a research need to be scientifically accurate. Therefore, a methodologically rigorous design, the involvement of competent parties, honest scientific conduct and ‘acceptance’ of results (even if negative) are required. Doing otherwise can lead to the production of wrong and/or unreliable results and, ultimately, to a waste of resources. There should also be a favourable risk-benefit ratio. For instance, in the case of research involving human beings or animals this means that what the subjects are subjected to, should somehow be compensated by the expected gain for themselves and/or the society. ·
How do you best lead an ethic discussion during a project that is controversial?
Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any ethical discussion technique which is considered to be the best. However, I think that it is worth highlighting at least one requirement that should be fulfilled in order to have an ethical discussion. While we all have thoughts and opinions, the capacity to successfully express one’s own viewpoints on ethical matters is not possessed by everybody. Saying ‘this is my opinion’ may not suffice. Students (and not only them) need training in ethics so to be able to appreciate the ethical issues involved in a project and to learn to discuss through tenable arguments.
What do you think is important to think about while doing an iGEM project?
I think that the ethical requirements suggested for when starting up/working on a project can provide a good framework to think about an iGEM project as well. I would like to focus on the requirement of the favourable risk-benefit ratio. In iGEM projects, there are no humans or animals involved. Only microorganisms. As you rightly pointed out in the booklet, researchers must think ahead and ‘be able to produce a thought-through statement about the future usage of the product’. The reason is that the potential risks involved may be particularly hard to foresee (e.g., interactions in the environment) and be linked to misuse and dual use practices in connection with the knowledge produced by the iGEM projects. In case of controversial projects (higher risks), the expected benefits should be superlative.
Do you think iGEM-team should discuss ethical problems about their project or is this something that is unnecessary?
I think that iGEM teams should discuss the ethical issues involved in their project. It is both a necessary practice and a good exercise.
Education
In our hunt to understand the complexity of ethics in science we have decided to also include the end user to our discussion. That is why we organized a panel discussion on the topic of ethics in science called Ethics of Engineering life. This event was our major collaboration with iGEM team Stockholm and together we managed to attract more than a 100 people to discuss their opinion with us. We have invited three experts from the field and had a two hour lively discussion with the audience on the most crucial topics in ethics. After the event the discussion continued during snacks and coffee.
Our team was also part of Synbio Hour where we presented our project and talked about the Ethical part. We have presented this part of the project during the Student Science Conference as well. Our team members also represented us abroad when our team member Sanka gave a presentation during Biosummit in Boston. In attempt to talk to other teams we have organized three webinars. You can read more about those and more in the Collaborations .
Our team was also part of Synbio Hour where we presented our project and talked about the Ethical part. We have presented this part of the project during the Student Science Conference as well. Our team members also represented us abroad when our team member Sanka gave a presentation during Biosummit in Boston. In attempt to talk to other teams we have organized three webinars. You can read more about those and more in the Collaborations .
Integration
To explain how we used our ethical research and integrated it in our project, we need to start from the choosing of the project. We felt the need to start assessing the possible implications of our project very early on. So we thought answering a couple of questions and talk to different people from the university while choosing the project would be the best way to go.
iGEM Uppsala team takes pride in letting the students of the team do all the heavy lifting and come up with a problem and a solution for their project themselves. We brainstormed ideas, did a lot of research about what can be done and then shared our project with professors and fellow iGEMers to check if we have something plausible. This is how we got from about 50 ideas to only 4.
Sound great, but we are talking about research and ethics are nowhere to be found! Well fear no more. This is a stage where we need to come up with a final decision. We have four potential projects. All of which seems realistic enough to be worked on. All of which seems to have caught interest of the team. So now it is time to take a peek at the ethical part of the problem. Thankfully, we have our 12 questions that we want to ask about a project before starting. You can read our ethical assessment of each project (after updating the questions during the project run). After talking about ethics our team had a democratic voting and concluded that Crafting Crocin was the project best suited for us to focus on.
But the ethical work is not over here, it's merely beginning. We needed to dig a bit deeper to make sure that we are going in the best possible way and treating the project responsibly. Before starting the project, we talked to experts in communicating science. Mirko Ancillotti and Stefan Eriksson gave us guidelines on how to speak about science and what language to use. We researched how to responsibly talk about science on the internet and social media. After which we decided to primarily use Facebook to contact the general public and talk about popular science and events. Instagram was used to communicate with other teams and share the spare of a moment adventures. Finally, we used LinkedIn to talk to professionals in the network. We also met with Heidi Howard, expert in legal, ethical and social aspects of consumer biology. She gave us tips and tricks on how to proceed with the project to the potential user. Next we also met lawyers from Uppsala Innovation Centre Per Kjellin and Olivia Tolan. They advise with projects like ours in the legal part. They helped us answer question about IPR rights and legal implications of the project. We talked about how it potentially would be unethical to not patent a product. This because then nobody would be able to develop it without any protection. However, after this project we decided to not patent our project as it would limit potential research use and our main reason for developing crocin was to make it available for researcher worldwide. This meeting gave us very useful advice on how to proceed in the future of not just our project but whole Uppsala iGEM in general.
If you read through our ethic endeavours you can see that we went deeper into talking ethics and iGEM. We asked not only the experts that shaped our project and its course from the beginning. We also asked iGEM community what they do and what they think about the questions we were asking. Upon that we were able to swing the course of some of our actions with these tips. While talking on the webinars we got plenty of tips on how other teams handle social media, IPR and social responsibility. We also talked to the general public about their concerns and opinions when it comes to technological advances. From there we learned how to adjust our marketing strategy of the project and work with the end user to gain insight on how to increase trust and reduce fear.
For more information of how we adapted our project according to our Ethical Guidelines see our integration
.
Events
In our run we took part in many events. We talked to the general public during our Panel and talked to other igem team in our Webinars . We took part in webinars, reddit dicsussion and discussed patent options .
