Team:UIOWA/Human Practices
Human Practices
Discussion with Professor Anya Prince on the Ethics of Genetic Manipulation and Engineering
With a competition in which the goal is to genetically manipulate a system, our team decided to sit down with Anya Prince, a University of Iowa professor and lawyer focusing on the ethics and legal standpoint on genetic testing. Professor Prince came fully prepared to have an open discussion on what the implications of our project may entail. She brought articles and statements from other outside sources on their views of the iGEM competition.
A frequent topic of discussion was the idea of Dual-Use. This is the idea that some physical thing can have more than one use. Take this drastic example; you want to study some nasty, highly virulent disease in hopes to find a cure. But in doing the research and publishing your results, you run the risk of someone out there deciding to read your papers in the malicious intent of weaponizing such a disease. Do you take the risk that someone out there might use your results for bad purposes? What if said disease had a high fatality rate, would you endanger the other people in your lab in hopes of furthering knowledge on this disease?
Our team wasn’t particularly concerned as our project revolves around a low hazard chemical and bacterium, but it was interesting to think of all the arguments for and against genetic engineering and manipulation. The common agreement was as long as genetic engineering is not used for the “wrong” purposes and instead used to benefit health, it is morally ethical.
Along the lines of ethics of a growing topic in science, we briefly covered what regulations and rules are imposed on science.The government has say over what can and can not be done in publicly owned labs. These include University labs and military. The interesting fact was that privately owned labs may not have to follow these same regulations. Another controversial topic was brought up; embryos. While there are governmental laws protecting embryos from experiments including gene editing, what’s to stop a private company from doing such a thing? And what if studying embryos for the purpose of curing hereditary diseases via gene editing is beneficial? Where does the government draw their boundary line between what should and should not be researched?
Overall, the team had a great conversation with Professor Prince. We learned a lot about regulations and what consequences our project could bring about. Luckily biodegradable plastic and a biosensor for biodegradable plastic can’t really be used in malicious ways!
At iGEM we believe societal considerations should be upfront and integrated throughout the design and execution of synthetic biology projects. “Human Practices” refers to iGEM teams’ efforts to actively consider how the world affects their work and the work affects the world. Through your Human Practices activities, your team should demonstrate how you have thought carefully and creatively about whether your project is responsible and good for the world. We invite you to explore issues relating (but not limited) to the ethics, safety, security, and sustainability of your project, and to show how this exploration feeds back into your project purpose, design and execution.
Interview with LanzaTech Metabolic Engineering Company
Jennifer Farrell, Delaney Soule, Sean Ryan and our mentor Dr. Sander had the pleasure of video chatting with Dr. Michael Koepke, the LanzaTech Team Leader for Synthetic Biology. LanzaTech is a chemical biotech company that uses industrial pollutants as a carbon source for their synthetically bioengineered fuel producing microbes.
During our call, we discussed the process LanzaTech uses when engineering metabolic pathways and what conditions our biosensor would have to operate under for it to be useful in their industrial process. Dr. Koepke’s primary concerns were the ability of our reporter to work under anaerobic conditions, a fast induction time, and the ability of the device to work in Clostridium autoethanogenum.
When considering the viability of our device in anaerobic conditions, we understood that most fluorescent proteins would not be a viable option because their chromophore require diatomic oxygen to active color expression. We also know that luciferase reporter we are using may face this challenge as well. To solve this, we discussed replacing the luciferase reporter with an anaerobic fluorescent protein such as phiLOV from pRPF185 (Buckley et al. 2016). Unfortunately, this does not exist as an iGEM BioBrick at this time and our lab is not equipped to work on bacteria in anaerobic conditions, making it difficult for us to adequately test the performance of such a construct in its intended chassis.
However, we have been able to demonstrate the viability of our device upstream from the reporter. Our device currently shows a luminescent signal around 6 hours after the introduction of 3-HP and xylose. This would be an improvement upon the LanzaTech screening time of about 12 hours. This would help tremendously in the screening of strains during the initial phases of testing.
With all this in mind, we feel that the future of our system would be the creation of a Clostridium autoethanogenum codon optimized phiLOV protein introduced into our device in place of our current luciferase reporter. With this change, we could develop new biobricks and expand the current iGEM library into more diverse organisms with current industrial applications.