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Team:St Andrews/project/ethics/community
From 2010.igem.org
A Study of Community
Contents |
Introduction
One person, many communities
Within our iGEM team we have individuals belonging to the biology community, the physics community and the computer science community. In this context we use community to refer to a community of interest - a group of likeminded individuals operating within the same field of knowlege. We are all members of the St Andrews community, some of us are also members of the London community, the Edinburgh community and the Aberdeenshire community. Here we describe a community of place, a group of people living in close proximity and sharing the same enviroment. These two seperate notions of community both share very similar underpinnings. In any context of community the common denomonator is groups of people. Traditionally all communites were bound by some form of geographical limitations. For instance for the longest time eastern and western mathematics developed within seperate communies, however both communities devleoped convergent ideas. Today, largely thanks to mass communication, we live in global communities, as a part of the iGEM community our team has ties with people all around the world.
This page represents our work in attempting to understand how the iGEM and synthetic biology community works and opearates and draws comparisons with earlier models of community. Our findings are presented in the following essay:
Essay
Addendum: Free Software, The Original Open Community
Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project is considered the father of Free Software however he does not believe that at the current stage of development that Free Software principles can be applied to synthetic biology. In an interview with reddit.com Mr Stallman claimed that realistically we are decades off being able to full comprehend the base genetic code behind both humans and bacteria and as such until we reach that point we will be unable to generate a Free Software like community around synthetic biology. The reason for this Stallman suggests is that genetic code is akin to a compiled binary, a program ready for execution on the computer hardware which is optimized for machines to understand and not humans. Stallman asserts that until individuals are able to easily modify and redistribute changes to organisms there is little hope for a Free Software like community. The argument proposed here is quite valid, the Free Software community has its roots in academia where in the 1960s hackers from various US institutions improved and redistributed each others software and this notion of sharing and cooperation served as the basis of a community. If synthetic biology wishes to generate an identically styled community to the Free Software community then there is the required prerequisite of being able to easily modify and redistribute artificial organisms. At present this is a difficult task which requires expensive equipment and supplies. Does this therefore sound the death knell of a potential synthtetic biology community? It certainly dimishes the possibility of any Free Software style community it does not however disallow the existence of alternative styles of open communities.
