Reviewing the President’s Synthetic Biology Report
Experts Gather at CAP to Discuss Recent Findings of Presidential Commission
SOURCE: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
Researchers observe genetically engineered yeast at the Berkeley Center for Synthetic Biology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The yeast is a precursor to the anti-malaria drug artemisinin which is being developed in the lab. Keasling is armed with a $42.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and he's busily fusing several genes taken from three different species to create a never-before-seen E. coli bacterium--a Dr. Frankenstein at the molecular level. The idea is to engineer the E. coli to spit out a malaria-fighting drug that is now found only in small traces in the wormwood plant.
Members and staff of the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues gathered at the Center for American Progress last Thursday to discuss the ethics and future of synthetic biology.
The commission has moved quickly since its inception last July to produce a farsighted report on the opportunities and ethics of synthetic biology and emerging technologies in December. In forming the commission the president asked experts to:
- “Review the developing field of synthetic biology
- “Consider the potential medical, environmental, security, and other benefits as well as potential health, security, or other risks
- “Identify appropriate ethical boundaries to maximize public benefits and minimize risks”
Speakers were Nelson Michael, M.D., Ph.D., a member of the commission and director of the Division of Retrovirology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research; and Valerie Bonham, J.D., executive director of the commission.
Because of the still emerging nature of this technology, Dr. Michael said, the commission had the “rare and exceptional opportunity to be forward looking instead of reactive,” to “take a deep breath and have a public dialogue.” In other words, it is better to begin to identify where future opportunities and threats may lie as new industries develop rather than to try to address them once entrenched interests have taken root.
Synthetic biology is the application of engineering principles to organisms and biological systems. The president’s formation of the commission was in response to last year’s announcement that Craig C. Venter had rebooted a single celled organism with an entirely synthetic genome. Dr. Michael pointed out that this process cost roughly $40 million and occupied a whole research team, but the feat caught the world by surprise and triggered a national debate.
There is a debate about whether Venter’s achievement specifically—and synthetic biology more broadly—are revolutionary in science, or merely an evolutionary extension of molecular biology and genetic engineering. According to Dr. Michael, “molecular biology was intended to ask questions and interrogate biological systems, whereas synthetic biology takes a different approach…While [it] sits on the shoulders of those that came before,” what is unique about synthetic biology, he continued, is that “synthetic biology seeks to make useful things.”
What kinds of useful things? Some of most promising near-term applications of the technology include more effective and efficient production of vaccines, environmentally friendly biofuels, and improved pharmaceuticals. For example, the chemical Artemisinin is a powerful antimalarial that currently must be extracted laboriously and expensively from the sweet wormwood plant. The hope is that pharmaceutical companies could use synthetic biology to engineer microbes to produce large amounts of this chemical in a form that is easy to refine, leading to a more affordable production technique for the life-saving drug. Similarly, researchers working in energy are hoping to use synthetic biology to engineer fuels from sunlight at the Department of Energy’s energy innovation hub at Lawrence Livermore. Using synthetic biology, researchers are experimenting with the genomes of algae species to produce high quantities of lipids for easy conversion to fuel.
But these possibilities are just the beginning. As with any emerging field of technology, where it will lead is difficult to predict. In one famous example of innovators failing to see the long-term implications of their technologies, Thomas John Watson Sr., the president of IBM Corporation in the 1950s supposedly said he believed there would be a world market for “maybe five computers.” Today there are about a billion computers worldwide. While it is unclear whether Thomas John Watson Sr. ever actually uttered those words, we do know that IBM Corporation suffered for its myopic focus on hardware and for failing to predict the vast and growing market for software that their innovation would create. If there is anything we know about technological innovation, it is that it is unpredictable.
Nonetheless, there are some common questions that we should ask of any new field, even if we do not know what it will look like in five, 10, or 50 years. The commission members and staff at the event on Thursday also noted that the report has implications for assessment of all emerging technologies. The report advocates that for synthetic biology and any emergent field of technology, policy needs to be guided by the principles of public beneficence, responsible stewardship, intellectual freedom and responsibility, democratic deliberation, and justice and fairness.
In investigating these principles for policy on synthetic biology, the commission engaged with leaders from the science, faith-based, legal, and ethics communities to evaluate potential risks, and created 18 principles for maximizing the public good. They also took a number of public comments, according to the commission’s executive director, Valerie H. Bonham, to ensure that they gathered “opinions from broad swath of society, on both technical and scientific issues and ethical concerns.” The results are a sensible balance between the “let science rip” approach—for example, minimal regulation to allow maximum progress, but also maximum risks—and an extremely measured regulatory approach that minimizes risk but also slows progress.
The president’s commission’s active engagement with stakeholders should serve as a model for the assessment of risks and benefits of new technologies.
You can view the event video and summary here, and you can download the commission’s report here.
Jonathan Moreno, Ph.D., is the Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Sean Pool is the Assistant Editor of Science Progress.
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