Team:Wisconsin-Madison/safety

iGEM Questionnaire

1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of: researcher safety, public safety, or environmental safety?

2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes, did you document these issues in the Registry? how did you manage to handle the safety issue? How could other teams learn from your experience?

3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution? If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project? If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?

4. Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?

Encryption Project

Ethical Issues of a 'true' encryption device:

1. There exists the threat of recombination or mutation of our system into nature, but such concerns are universal to synthetic biology. Spontaneous recombination is also a concern of ours.
2. Possible dangers with pathogens put behind our system to react to specific conditions. However, the design of such a construct is very obviously intended to be harmful.
3. Patenting and idea rights...can you own a genetic invention? Is it ethical to protect such an invention? How do you evaluate the dangers of new genetic inventions? By protecting a genetic invention, at what extent are we hiding the dangers of that invention? Or if by patenting it, would we divulge enough information to assist with the potential dangers or danger prevention?
4. Our encryption system is designed to prevent unintentional expression of genes. With such a system, it is possible to regulate the production of harmful or potentially harmful peptide or small molecule production.

Lab Safety

[http://oba.od.nih.gov/oba/rac/guidelines_02/NIH_Gdlnes_lnk_2002z.pdf Guildlines for working with DNA recombinant molecules]