Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/1161
36 summer 2009 36 summer 2009 36 36 so any accidental release is fated to die out within a few generations, because it's just not competitive enough. h+: don't you think people may be taking some ethical liberties when they try doing this at home because of the lack of transparency? mP: Do you mean because there aren't reporting requirements to the NIH or the FDA? h+: Not just the lack of government oversight, but the fact that someone may be engaging in, forgive the dramatization, Mengele- type experiments and no one would know. mP: One thing I've noticed about the DIYbio list in particular is that the open-source approach leads to more transparency. I come from an academic background in Cs and linguistics, and something that's always frustrated me about academia is the fixation on keeping research secret from other research groups because people are afraid of getting scooped. Here, no one cares about getting scooped — the focus is on learning, and if someone else solves a problem first, then that's great, because that means the problem has been solved. egos don't get in the way. We also have people documenting their research in public list e-mails and on blogs, like what JJ is doing with his "Homebrew Bioscience research" blog, where he chronicles his experiments with moss. It's interesting you mention that. I recently read an article about a town in Brazil that has an unusually high population of twins — and there's evidence that it was this town that mengele fled to after WW2. so I think the question of whether people will engage in unethical experimentation sort of answers itself, without getting into DIYbio at all. As a community I think it's our responsibility to encourage ethical experimentation and to reinforce that on a social level — i.e., taking a stand against work that we think is unethical, and taking a good hard look at our own work to make sure that we're doing the right thing. I've gotten into some interesting discussions on my own blog about the ethical issues involved with transgenic symbiotes that complete the vitamin C synthesis pathway in humans… whether it would be ethical to release them on a global scale or not. On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide suffer from scurvy, and I want to help solve that problem and reduce human suffering. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who are strongly opposed to GmOs for a variety of reasons and are angry at the notion of an endemic GmO, even one that prevents a very serious disease. And I do think that their rights have to be respected. so it's a very difficult tightrope to walk, and the questions about what is ethical and what isn't are really tough. They don't have simple answers. so I think my responsibility as an ethical researcher is to engage with these questions as they come up, and try to find solutions that reduce human suffering but still respect people's rights. h+: In a recent interview with Monitor 360 you compared dIYbiology with birdwatching. don't you feel that there is a league of difference between the two? mP: Well, I'm a generalist at heart, even if I'm working in a very specific area. To be honest, most of the cool things I've done scientifically have come from cross-pollinating a couple of different research areas. so I make that point about birdwatching and cataloging trees to remind people that biology is really, really big, and it's worthwhile for experts in small subfields to keep abreast of what's going on in other areas of the field, because our expertise can help other people and their expertise can help us. Between synthetic biology and birdwatching, absolutely. On the other hand, both DIY synthetic biology and birdwatching are biological endeavours, and a term like "DIYbiology" is broad enough to encompass both. Western culture has a long and exciting tradition of talented amateurs contributing to the progress of science, and I hope people remember that we're following in the steps of people like John James Audubon (who discovered and cataloged hundreds if not thousands of bird and mammalian species, expanding our understanding of North American biodiversity) as well as edward Jenner, Jonas salk, James Watson, Francis Crick, Kary mullis and so on. Jenner came up with the notion of using cowpox as a vaccine for smallpox by observing that people who worked with cattle and got cowpox didn't contract smallpox, and developed his vaccine from that — and he was an amateur just like we are. He used his observations of the larger environment to guide his research, and that's a really important facet of science — recognizing what's going on in the world and using our observations to further understanding.