Berkeley Engineering Blogs

Well who wouldn’t?!?

You may think that if you don’t have access to a University Laboratory and fancy, enigmatic equipment (not to mention expen$ive), then practicing synthetic biology is out of reach.

Well, I found a website dedicated to
“makeing biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety.” DIYbio.org is a really interesting site with blog entries and information on local events and conferences. While clicking around the site I found an interesting entry concerning amateur participation in the iGEM 2009 competition. It seems that amateur participation won’t be allowed this year due to safety and bureaucratic concerns…

So, I’d like to pose this question to the other iGEMers: What would you imagine a safety framework for amateur of DIYbio might look like? How would it be enforced?

On an e-mail discussion list for synthetic biology, the question was posed, in regards to what iGEM teams produce specifically: “how is this organism going to be contained, if it’s use is suggested for release in the real world?”  The author then makes an excellent distinction between the actors involved in using synthetic biology: there are the “good guys,” the “greedy guys,” and the “bad guys.” The vast majority of recent discussion surrounding things going dangerously wrong within synthetic biology focuses on these bad guys and forgets about the others.  Even if we could distinguish what makes a bad guy bad, we would miss the point entirely, as they make up a miniscule percentage of those dealing with genetically engineered organisms. It is easy to think about keeping the tools of synthetic biology away from those who would want to intentionally do anyone harm (although, once again, how does one go about defining who such “malicious forces” are?), and certainly a basic level of regulation is necessary for restricting access in general. 

The real question, and the more difficult one to answer, is what sorts of regulations can be set up within the extremely diverse synthetic biology community (which includes academics, industry affiliates, garage “bio-hackers”–discussed at length here–and others) to restrict the possibilities of accidental contamination? 

How is containment dealt with with the UC Berkeley iGEM wet lab team’s project? Even though the argument could be made that this project is directed at ameliorating the process of doing synthetic biology instead of actually existing in the “real world,” what steps can be taken within the iGEM community towards preparedness? Would you agree with Drew Endy that the problem of containment is properly dealt with within current requirements of the iGEM competition?