Team:SDU-Denmark/safety-e

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Ethics

Abstract

We have chosen to put a great deal of effort into making our project as safe as possible. This safety paper represents our thoughts and ideas, as well as throughout assessments of the safety and security of the project. We have, in addition to assessing the safety and security, attempted to create a new safety standard in the form of a watermarking standard. We have taken care, throughout the process of electing a project, not to create a potentially pathogenic bacteria. This made us abandon our initial project as we foresaw some issues concerning the pathogenicity of our construct. We have blasted all genes and proteins for homologs in pathogenic bacteria, and performed a risk-assessment of each bio-brick, as well as an assessment of the entire project. We have taken care to uphold the laws and safety guidelines laid out by the UN as well as by the Danish Government, especially concerning assessing the risks of our project, as well as the properties of the individual parts, such as substitution of potentially pathogenic material, and the guidelines for personal safety. We have enlisted the help of our local bio-safety group, associated with the university, to help us better grasp the potential risks of our project as well as offering a lab-safety course, that all participating students passed.

Finally, to further the safety of the world at large, we have created a watermarking standard. We propose to insert watermarks into synthetically engineered parts. The watermark consists of a licence associated with the creating team, accessible from the parts-registry, containing information on how to contact the creating team, as well as all relevant information and characterizations of the parts involved.