Can synthetic biology deliver on its promise without repeating the ethical failures of past technologies? This new report maps the crossroads of innovation, risk, and responsibility, revealing what’s at stake for our future.
Report: Ethical Challenges and Concerns in Synthetic Biology. Image Credit: sizsus art / Shutterstock
A recent report from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy discussed the ethical concerns and challenges in synthetic biology (SynBio). SynBio is an interdisciplinary field of biology and engineering that manipulates DNA to design and redesign systems, such as biological pathways, genes, or organisms. SynBio tools are used to develop new medical therapies, break down chemicals, develop more sustainable fertilizers, and identify disease outbreaks. These new promises of innovation raise ethical challenges and questions about the use of SynBio products.
This report highlights six themes or areas related to ethical challenges associated with research and products of SynBio. These themes include the original sequence: 1) engineering life, 2) risks and potential benefits, 3) equity and distribution of risk, benefits, and access, 4) environmental ethics, 5) promises, speculations, and hype, and 6) research collaborations.
Engineering Life
SynBio involves engineering life by generating new organisms or manipulating existing ones. This leads to discussions on the role of humans, including objections to “playing God,” concerns about potential implications of engineering life, and how SynBio products should be treated. Many people who invoke the “playing God” critique use it as grounds to reject a technology without further justification or explanation.
Merely interfering with nature or natural order is insufficient for rejecting technology. Besides, many widely accepted technologies allow human interference with nature, including interventions associated with creating life (in vitro fertilization) or manipulating natural order (selective breeding). The report also highlights that SynBio challenges existing classification systems and raises ontological questions about the identity and moral status of synthetic organisms. Some SynBio products may blur the line between ‘thing-like’ and ‘person-like’ entities, prompting debate over ownership, ethical treatment, and intellectual property rights. SynBio enables the creation of organisms that can mutate, adapt, or self-direct their evolutionary pathways. This unpredictability complicates regulatory oversight and risk assessment. The report further questions whether SynBio entities, such as brain organoids exhibiting cognition, deserve ethical protections beyond their designed functionality.
Risk Assessment
Understanding risk is pivotal to ethical SynBio work. Risk assessment involves considering both the potential benefits and harms associated with this work. Risk is a complex concept that involves uncertainty and requires analysis on multiple levels. It has five dimensions: identity, timing, probability, permanence, and value. Risks associated with biosecurity and biosafety are among the common risks in SynBio. Therefore, understanding security and safety concepts is crucial for addressing risks. Risk assessment in SynBio is an inherently normative activity embedded in social contexts, requiring multidisciplinary expert input and public engagement. The report outlines three major principles for managing risk: the precautionary principle (“better safe than sorry”), the reasonable risk principle (balancing risks with potential benefits), and the hopeful principle (assuming innovation is essential unless proven unsafe).
In general, risks are tolerated because of the potential benefits associated with activities that pose those risks. The potential benefits and applications of SynBio encompass healthcare and medicine, environmental remediation and pollution control, biofuel production and clean energy, innovation in basic research and development, industrial biomanufacturing, conservation and ecosystem resilience, as well as sustainable agriculture and food security. However, the report emphasizes that these are “potential” rather than guaranteed benefits, and considerable uncertainty often remains.
Common risks associated with SynBio include ecological or environmental risks, socioeconomic risks, risks to animals, and health and psychosocial risks to humans. A SynBio risk assessment model must account for multidisciplinary experts, whose insights should be relevant to identifying and assessing risks, as well as determining the appropriate response to both unknown and identified risks. Declarations of safety reflect normative judgments involving ethical decisions.
Equity and Access
SynBio is often portrayed with optimism, providing solutions to societal problems. However, this portrayal assumes that any SynBio product will benefit society. Nonetheless, this assumption is challenged by differences in value systems, economic competitiveness, and differences in resource distribution and knowledge.
The integration of societal values in the research, development, and application of SynBio technology can promote either unjust or just distribution of its benefits and risks. Moreover, it is impossible to predict all potential ways a technology could affect social structures, making it difficult to address questions on attaining justice. Historical examples of unjust and inequitable distribution, as well as the effects of technology, could provide a roadmap of what must be avoided. The report notes that issues of ownership and intellectual property rights, such as patenting versus open-source models, can shape who benefits from SynBio. Historical injustices, like the exclusion of marginalized communities from research and technology, risk being perpetuated if not addressed deliberately. There is a need to ensure that historically marginalized populations are not again used as test subjects for new Synthetic Biology products.
Environmental Ethics
Anthropogenic climate change has led to biodiversity loss and the release of toxic byproducts. Consequently, SynBio is being used to develop products and tools to reverse these impacts, which include the development of genetically engineered microbes (for carbon capture, pollutant remediation, and biosensing), de-extinction efforts (to revive extinct species), and gene drive technology (to reduce species invasion).
However, these efforts raise ethical considerations about how environmental applications of technologies create new relationships and structures and impact ecosystems. Where the natural environment derives value is a central question to environmental ethics. The environment can be viewed as possessing both intrinsic and instrumental values. Instrumental value refers to how a non-human technology or environment serves human needs and interests.
Entities with intrinsic value are deemed worthy of respect beyond usefulness. Instrumental and inherent values influence the perception of the potential benefits, uses, and risks associated with environmental biotechnologies. These (values) also inform anthropocentric and ecocentric worldviews. Besides, meaningful consideration of environmental ethics and impacts of SynBio technologies requires an understanding of ecology and conservation. The report also explores concerns about diminishing “wildness” and respect for nature’s intrinsic value, intergenerational justice for future people, and the “moral hazard” argument that reliance on SynBio solutions could delay more fundamental environmental action. The report questions whether restoration to "unaffected" environments is possible or even definable, highlighting how the idea of “wildness” is contested.
Hype, Uncertainty, Promises, and Speculation
What makes a technology promising, and who decides it is worth pursuing? By referring to new technology as promising, it is implied that it will yield something positive, which may or may not occur. Labeling technology as promising may lead to hype. Promising is precarious since any promise about science and technology exists between imagination and reality. Therefore, promises must be treated with thoughtfulness and care.
Promising is essential in research to secure and sustain funding early. A vital aspect of promising science is how potential research outcomes are framed in the face of uncertainty. While uncertainty may justify the need for further research, it may also present some research projects as too risky from a hazards and financial perspective, thereby terminating their trajectory. Therefore, finding the best ways to portray uncertainty and do justice to potential benefits, while avoiding overpromising and exaggeration, is critical.
Research Collaborations
Collaborations are a crucial part of research, with over 70% of research articles being collaborative with authors from multiple institutions. However, the multidisciplinary nature of SynBio work makes some collaborations more challenging. These challenges include ensuring adherence to scientific norms for data collection, analysis, and sharing, ascertaining and distributing credit for work, and working with animal and human subjects.
For effective collaboration, researchers must understand the cultures and standards of other disciplines. Furthermore, transnational collaborations are essential for developing guidelines, oversight, and governance that ensure the ethical development of research and products. However, these collaborations also generate ethical challenges as collaborators come from countries with distinct regulations, scientific cultures, and ethical norms. For example, political tensions such as the FBI’s China Initiative exemplify how research security concerns can target specific ethnic groups and complicate international collaboration.
Concluding Remarks
Together, SynBio represents an emerging discipline with the potential to reshape the world. The potential applications of SynBio could impact medicine, remediation, agriculture, and other fields. To ensure SynBio products are accessible and serve public interests, a strong understanding of people's ethical concerns is necessary. Researchers should consider regulatory challenges and regularly engage with the public and stakeholders to identify concerns and areas of conflict, thereby mitigating them.