What are the moral and ethical concerns of synthetic biology?

Synthetic Biology is a multidisciplinary research that aims to produce novel biological systems, organisms, and biological parts, or to improve a system that already exists in nature. Although synthetic biology has made great contributions to science and our daily life, it also raises many ethical and moral concerns. Two of them are discussed here.

1. Risks of Releasing Synthetic Entities into the Environment.

Many synthetic biology projects involve producing new organisms and biological parts and releasing them into the environment to achieve certain goals. For example, scientists release genetically modified mosquitos on Cayman Islands to reduce the population of a mosquito that transmit dengue virus. However, processes like this may lead to potential risks of changing the environment unwillingly, as it is always challenging to predict the future behavior of the released entities. Therefore, scientists should develop strategies to weight the possible risks against benefits. (Anderson, et al. 2012)

2. Intentional Misuse of Knowledge from Synthetic Biology

Although people can use synthetic biology technique to create organisms that benefit the world, they can also create organisms that take away lives, i.e. biological weapons. For example, scientists can synthesis lethal human pathogens. By the spreading of these manmade human pathogens, a large population of people can be killed in a short period. Therefore, scientists should always remember that scientific knowledge could be used in both good and harmful ways. Sometimes the risk of being used harmfully is so high that scientists will have to consider whether the knowledge should be pursued anymore. Similar example is the restrictions on developing nuclear weapons world widely. (Douglas and Savulescu 2010)

Besides these two ethical concerns, there are many other ethical and moral problem that should be considered. For example, is the creature of synthetic biology an organism or a machine?

Reference

Anderson, James, Natalja Strelkowa, Guy-Bart Stan, Thomas Douglas, Julian Savulescu, Mauricio Barahona, and Antonis Papachristodoulou. 2012. "Engineering and ethical perspectives in synthetic biology." EMBO reports 584 - 590.

Douglas, Thomas, and Julian Savulescu. 2010. "Synthetic biology and the ethics of knowledge." Journal of Medical Ethics 687 - 693.