Re: [biocurious] Re: [DIYbio] Re: Biohackerspace/DIYbio GMO Release

• Who would appoint the members of the committee? How is it governed? What stops members abusing their position?
• Are they taking responsibility for the decisions, if so are they being compensated or is there insurance to protect them?
• How can the committee enforce it's recommendations?
• It is against a culture of self-reliance whereby individuals take responsibility to investigate and answer these questions themselves
• It doesn't scale

[I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more of a response to this e-mail . . .]

I think disposal is a very important issue, in that the *perceived* hazard of glowing petri dishes (even if the real hazard were practically nil) could cause a great deal of distress among the general public, potentially leading to unnecessary restrictions on DIYbio work.  Imagine if you're a maintenance worker emptying a garbage can in the park (or any other place where you wouldn't expect to find strange looking biological samples) and you discover you've just touched these weird glowing germs.  You are probably not going to dismiss it as easily as that moldy burger you picked up earlier, you're probably going to wonder and worry.  Maybe a lot.  Maybe enough to get your supervisor involved (who might get the city council involved, and the mayor, and your congressional representative... and so on).

And that is why, early on at least, I think it's important to have procedures in place to review the appropriateness of releasing modified organisms from the controlled environment of the lab.  I fully expect things to become less restrictive as time goes on, after self-regulation has proved effective and the general public has more confidence in the DIYbio community.

I apologize if I haven't been clear about this before -- I am not opposed to the release of GMOs per se (my graduate work focused on engineering biocontrol agents for crop protection, and much of my subsequent professional work has included similar releases).  What I am concerned about is the fact that much of the DIYbio movement (especially community labs like bioC) have a focus on putting recombinant DNA technology into the hands of individuals who do not have an extensive background in biology, and who therefore may not yet be well equipped to determine the risks associated with the release of their engineered organism.  In these early days of DIYbio, therefore, it seems like it would be prudent to have a process in place for reviewing proposed releases of GMOs before they actually happen, so that the experimenters have ample opportunity to fine tune their work beforehand.

There are many different possible structures that could be put into place, ranging from just posting on an open electronic forum, to having a centralized standing committee that reviews confidential submissions.  The main thing, for me at least, is to have some sort of process in place to demonstrate that the DIYbio community gives due consideration to the risks of the work that is undertaken.

Lou

[P.S. I will be out of town and won't be able to attend the discussion next week]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 2:44 PM, Raymond McCauley <ray...@raymondmccauley.net> wrote:

I wanted to mention that we've got a request in front of BioCurious to
allow students and researchers in the lab to take transformed E. coli
K-12 out of the lab. I was hoping we could use this as a focus for
discussion along with Glowing Plant,/plants in general. If it's E.
coli & GFP, is that OK? How about RFP? Etc. What are the classes of
things you'd allow or not?

Do you require disposal of materials after they leave (i.e., hand out
instructions on sterilizing petri dishes with bleach)? Require a
signed release? Does this count as general environmental release?

What's the generalized set of questions you'd want asked, and answers
given, to determine if this is OK for a given transformation?

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Patrik D'haeseleer <pat...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Josh Perfetto <jo...@snowrise.com> wrote:
>>
>> There is one question I have about the Glowing Plant that I have not seen
>> discussed. What might the ecosystem effects of glowing plants be?
>
>
> Actually, that's a fairly common question - both from the ecosystem and from
> the light pollution perspective.
>
> - The amount of light produced by these plants will likely be very dim -
> definitely far less than the full moon.
>
> - There are at least 70 different bioluminescent fungi, plus of course
> fireflies and a couple other bioluminescent insects, all of which will
> likely be brighter than the glowing plant.
>
> - Street lights kill billions of insects every day. Not to mention those bug
> zapper lights which are intentionally designed to kill insects. Both of
> these are orders of magnitude brighter than any bioluminescent organism.
>
> Given the abundance of man-made and natural light sources, I would expect a
> dimly glowing Arabidopsis plant to have an insignificant impact on the
> ecosystem - and even less on light pollution.
>
> Patrik
>
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