Team:St Andrews/project/ethics/community

From 2010.igem.org

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. Quoting from [http://www.reddit.com/tb/cv7sw an interview with reddit.com] Mr Stallman said the following:

How can we apply the concepts of free software development to the upcoming biological revolution of synthetic and hybrid organisms? RMS: I don't think these ideas are applicable to biology at our current technological level. The free software movement is based on the recognition that nonfree software gives the program's developer unjust power over the users. Free software prevents that by giving the users control over the software they use. Free software achieves this because users can change the software and recompile it, then use their own versions. Even in 1969, when computers were rare and only a few people used them, we who used them had the practical means to change and compile software, not merely to run it. The situation for genetically modified organisms is totally different. There is no general tool for performing a genetic modification comparable to using a text editor (or a 1960s card punch) to alter the source code of a program, then compiling it and running it. Today's genetically engineered organisms were made by the equivalent of using `sed' to patch an executable which was mostly a black box. We can understand and change programs because they were designed. Good designers know how to make a design understandable so others can change it later. Natural organisms are a mess; any designer, seeing the myriad kludges, each one different, recognizes these systems were never designed. Natural organisms never had anything like source code. The genetic code of an organism is more comparable to a binary (in fact, quaternary) executable. Imagine a C compiler made by patching the binary of hello.c a billion times in a genetic algorithm and you'll see how hard this is to understand. Now that we have a quaternary dump of the human genome, it will take decades of reverse engineering by tens of thousands of biologists to figure out what it does. If some day the technology for changing organisms predictably is as mature as changing programs predictably was in 1958, then the freedom to change and share and use genomes will be an important political issue comparable to that of free software today. As long as large research teams struggle with tasks a little beyond "Hello World", whether we are allowed to change the organisms we use will be a question of little practical significance. Genetically modified organisms today raise totally different issues: for instance, damaging human health, damaging the environment, and polluting other farms with patented genes through natural cross-pollination.