Abstract

This is an international field guide to the ethical issues surrounding synthetic biology. It is not a policy document, nor is it a "hyphen-ethics” piece (bio-ethics, nano-ethics) but instead a hands-on guide to any practitioners of emerging technologies with lots of unknowns. This document has been sliced and diced in order to be short and easily referenced by those that do synthetic biology, not just those who sit around reading about it. That said, we recognize there are underlying issues here that require a more thorough treatment, which can be found in our citations. The three major types of ethical concerns when doing research in an emerging field are concerns about safety, fairness, and concerns about non-physical harms including questions about whether there are some types of research that should simply not be done.

• 1. Be open to discussing your research. Put a description of your experiments online, have a clear way for press and interested members of the public to contact you with questions, and make sure your results are published in journals that have an open-access option.
• 2. Rigorously document your research and archive your results. An organized lab notebook is the baseline - an online notebook is best.
• 3. Ask senior scientists from a local university or company to act as an advisory board to your team. Despite the incredible talent levels of some younger teams, it is easy for beginners to not see dangers that are obvious to more experienced researchers. Find someone who can check on what you’re up to every so often and make sure you aren’t doing anything unwise by accident.

We think that the information and tools necessary to do synthetic biology must be made widely available. Enough has been said about the broken and parasitic pay-to-read model; we welcome with open arms the arrival of alternatives like PLoS and BioMedCentral. We oppose pay-walls, proprietary licensing schemes, and we strongly encourage grant applicants to include open-access publishing costs in their grants.
Furthermore, the benefits of SB must be widely distributed. This is not a radical demand: the money for most of this research is provided by the taxes paid by citizens of countries around the world. Providing easy access to the results of this research is no less than giving people what they have already bought and paid for.

Finally, we believe there are some ethical issues that deal neither with safety nor distributional fairness, but with nonphysical and relatively “fuzzy” issues that scientific ethics declarations often shy away from. We will shy no more!
We believe that as synthetic biologists, our relationship to nature is like that of an apprentice craftsmen to a grandmaster. We will therefore attempt to learn from nature as we do our work and treat it with the respect it deserves. We will move forward cautiously and with a sincere awareness of our own clumsiness.