Team:Amsterdam/Human Outreach/Education/Ethics

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Ethics discussion with DWARS

On the night preceding this the jamboree in Amsterdam the Rathenau instituut organises, together with the European iGEM Committee 2011, a Meeting of Young Minds, in which political youth organizations from the Netherlands and the iGEM participants will debate the future of synthetic biology. The iGEM teams from the Netherlands have been involved in the project in an earlier stage. More information on this can be found here

Since the political youth organizations do not have the knowledge they need for a good debate, one of the organizations asked us to give an introduction presentation on iGEM, synthetic biology and the ethical side of this scientific field. DWARS, the youth department of GreenLeft, the Dutch Green political party, organized a debate, in the evening of the 29th of August, for their members and invited us to give a presentation in the beginning of the evening.

During the presentation we talked about what synthetic biology is and how it is defined. We introduced the iGEM competition and explained our project. After this theoretical part we discussed the dangers of doing synthetic biological research and to what extend we should worry about these dangers. We broadened this with the ethical issues surrounding the field. We closed our presentation with a small comparison of synthetic biology and genetically modification.

After the presentation followed a discussion with the present members of DWARS. The chairman had prepared a couple of statements that were talked about. These statements included, amongst other, the self regulation by scientists and the scale on which synthetic biology can take place.

In our opinion this evening has been inspirational for both parties. For us it was great to witness the enthusiasm of the political youth about the field of synthetic biology. We believe that the presentation and discussion has helped them in a great deal with the preparations of the debate on the 30th of September.