From 2007.igem.org

Summer Orientation

The Hierarchy:

Top Professor: He/she is concerned with the more managerial issues that happen in a lab. He/she would be the person who would have the actual thought about the societal benefit to the project at stake.

Post Doc: He/she is the micromanager. They are the ones who are in the lab working and managing the researchers. They are more concerned with the techniques that the people below him/her are using to get the project finished.

Bottom Technician, Graduate Student, Undergraduate Student: The technician works above the graduate/undergraduate student. These researchers are more concerned with the fundamental practices of being a researcher. They might think about what they are doing as being a societal benefit, but it's rare.

Mission Statement:

This hierarchy chart is a great way to explain my purpose as an anthropologist in the lab. It is the professor who is the person who is thinking about “is this project going to benefit society?” the men below him rarely think about the societal implications of their work in the lab because they are too focused on the basic fundamentals in the lab, like learning a new technique to do digests, for example. For a researcher to think about the societal implications of their work on a more regular basis means that he or she would need to be a professor. This takes years to do and when he or she does become a professor they rarely are in the lab. Since the men who are in the lab on a daily basis are not constantly thinking about those issues it is my job to act as a catalyst to get he or she to think on the level of a professor.

** It must also be understood that I am apart of the team and not a separate entity. Just like my teammates I have a task to do in the lab.

** Here inlays the question: with me being apart of the lab and of the hierarchy (bottom with the rest of my teammates) is it my goal that eventually through the evolution of the lab that researchers will internally become apart of human practices rather than there always being an external “human practices” who is not doing lab procedures like the rest of the people in the lab?

• Will “human practices” always involve having an external person?

Mode 1: there are known answers to known questions. This is not to say that the answers are correct but that there are possible answers. For example, there are questions with in the lab that he or she knows the possible answer to:

** What is “good” science?

• This can be answered in the form of technology that makes science practices possible and better.

Safety/ Security: It has been brought up several times in the lab and during lunch as to where the “kill switch” should go on the E.coli.

Regulation: The researchers understand that they are to regulate themselves while in the lab. But he or she had not gone into detail as to what regulation means to them.

Q: What does regulation means today? Is it internal, external, or both? What are the institutions of regulations within the lab and outside the lab? [Read the White paper to give better explanation later on]. Institutional boards can be seen as both regulation and imposing ethical limitations. These boards are external/ bureaucratic bodies that check-up on the researchers to make sure that the researchers are following up on their own regulations as well as the regulations imposed on them by the board.

Ethics: Institutional Review Boards (IRB) can be seen as both regulation and imposing ethical limitations. These boards are external/ bureaucratic bodies that check-up on the researchers to make sure that the researchers are following up on their own regulations as well as the regulations imposed on them by the board.

• What are kinds of ethical questions are institutions like IRB or any other outside institution ask of a project like this (iGEM).

• Is the equality of access an ethical question that an IRB or any other body would ask about this project?

What about the privatization of pure whole blood verses the synthetic blood made by the lab? What type of scenarios are there if synthetic blood were to become available to the public? How would health insurance companies handle this? Would health insurance charge patients more money for the pure whole blood? Will it matter during a traumatic situation? Will people care whether he or she receives real or synthesized blood?

Optimization: Why is the team building a chassis out of E.coli especially if e.coli is seen as being dangerous bacteria to the human body?

• One of the benefits about synthetic biology is recognizing this issue and re-engineering the E.coli into a chassis that is safe for human use. The team is using E.coli as the chassis for the hemoglobin for three reasons. The first is because UC Berkeley labs have been working with E.coli and know its properties well enough to know how to make it safe for human use. The second is because E.coli is a cheap resource to hold the hemoglobin.

• If the researchers are going to make something for the society/everyone they also need to keep a business sense about the materials that they use, one being the cost of materials. E.coli is a cheap material to use for the chassis, which means that this will also make the cost of the synthetic hemoglobin at a reasonable price.

Lastly, E.coli is an effective chassis to use.

• The researchers know that E.coli is an effective chassis to use because he or she has used it for making the malaria vaccination artemesinin.

I.P.: What types of parts, devices, and chassis are to be open source? (Distinction between private and public parts.)

Mode 2: This is the idea of science where there are questions but no way to answer the question. Everyone has his or her own way of answering the question but there will never be one right answer. There is uncertainty.

** What is “good” science?

• This question in terms of ethics, security, safety, I.P., and ect. (Everyone has his or her own opinion as to what “good” science is, but there really is not a definite answer).

Safety/ Security: There is this analogy that can be used from a television show called “Modern Marvels”. In an episode they discuss engineering disasters. A disaster that they talk about on the show was about how a satellite shut down in the early 1990’s and caused pagers and networks to loose connection for a few days. The engineers found the cause of the problem to be that one of the metals used in the computer chips was reacting to another metal, making a new electrical connection that caused the satellite to face the wrong direction and not being able to receive signals. The metal causing this problem was tin, which the engineers used because they claimed it to be a readily available source and cheap. For a few years after the satellite incident tin was no longer used to make these types of chips, but then many companies decided to go back to using tin to make their chips because it was such a cheap resource. Since the reinstatement of tin, engineers have not been able to figure out how to stop this metal reaction from happening, but only that they recognize that there will be a problem in the near future and when the problem arises that they will have to “deal” with the problem.

• We can also think about this in regards to E.coli. When the engineers first built the chip all they knew was that the system worked with tin, only to find out thirty years later that the tin would react to make “wire worms” redirecting information and causing the system to “fail”. Right now we know that E.coli can be engineered in a way that is safe for the human body to consume. But what about in thirty years? Do we have any guarantee that our bodies will not later react to the E.coli in our system, causing a “failure” to the system? Are there any possible “plans” in case this was to happen? If so, how could this E.coli reaction in the body be fixed? (You can’t just physically remove the E.coli from your body once it has been put in).

** What about open source/ transparency?

• How does human practices go about answering this question?

• Is it right to “overreact” to the thought of possible bio-terrorism and close down open source access to the information? (Open source means that the information about the bio bricks is readily available to anyone).

• Rob Carlson thinks that it is best to be “dynamic” and allow the scientific information to be available to everyone. This just means that we do have to be aware of the possibility of an attack and be prepared.

-I think that we should be dynamic in the sense if we “overreact” to the possibility of bio-terrorism by shutting down open source then the terrorists have already won. It is best to no live in fear but rather to “prepare for the worse and hope for the best”. Everyone else should not be punished.

Ethics:

I.P.: Can the open source model be sustained?

Keep in mind:

• What type of implications (security/safety, ethics, and I.P.) will this have on human practices (society and science)?

• What effects does synthetic hemoglobin have on human practices?

• What is the dignity of human beings? Does the engineering of artificial biological parts take away human dignity?

- Do my colleagues think about what they are doing in this sort of manner? I would like to think that they do. From the papers that I have read the authors claim that they want "to make living things better and better living things" (Rabinow 2007: 6), but how do people feel about this on the outside of the lab? Can everyone within society eventually accept the concept of artificial biological parts?

• iGEM is making the future. What does the future look like?

- There are positive and negatives to this question. The positive is that iGEM is with the good intentions of “making living things better and better living things”. The negative could be that someone could use this new technology for contradictory intentions.

Me inside the Lab:

• It takes a while to understand that I am apart of the team. When looking over my field notes I recognize that I call my teammates “the team” or “the researchers” rather than “my teammates”, “colleagues”, or “collaborators”.

• It is also difficult to understand when to make that distinction between “my teammates”/ “colleagues” and “the team”/ “the researchers” because I do have to step back and reflect especially when I ask them questions and reflect about their answers. Is it best to just call them by their name? For they are human and apart of society just like me. I need to remember to watch my choice of language. It is interesting to see how innate our use of language is to separating science and society on its own.