Draft Letter to the President's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues

[Jason Bobe]

Hello DIYbio -

Following the publication of Venter's work on Synthia, president Obama asked the President's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to review the field of synthetic biology and generate a report with recommendations.  In the six month window they have to write the report, the commission is holding a series of meetings and is taking comments from the public.  More background info here: http://www.bioethics.gov/

A few DIYbio folks got together at the Open Science Summit to brainstorm about the opportunity and I think there was general agreement that it is really important for the DIYbio community to submit a letter to the commission.

Why is it important?  If we do not define DIYbio in our own words to the commission, undoubtedly others with define the community for us and it may not be favorable or even remotely accurate (especially if the periodic media frenzy is any indication).

Should we write one letter or many letters?  I have spoken to a few different people about the how the commission operates, and from what I can gather it would be much more powerful if the community could come together and support the submission of a single letter to the commission.  Even though members of the community obviously don't always agree on everything, if we could generate a general consensus on how to define the community and its importance in the grand scheme of things, that would go a long way.  Anyone can submit a letter to the commission, and I in no way want to discourage that, but it would be great if we could put the DIYbio imprimatur on one letter. 

How can you help?  One area that I could really use help from the community is to hear your ideas about would you would like for the commission to recommend to the president in terms of DIYbio and amateur / non-institutional practice in the life sciences?  The commission has been asked to "develop recommendations about any actions the Federal government should take to ensure that America reaps the benefits of this developing field of science while identifying appropriate ethical boundaries and minimizing identified risks.”  We could conclude the letter with our own recommendation for the commission to consider.

For efficiency, I have taken a first cut at drafting a letter to the president's commission, with helpful comments from Mac and few community lab folks and the OSS attendees.  Any errors are my own though.  Take a look at the document and let me know what you think.  In the description of DIYbio did I miss anything that is important to you?  You can add your comments to this thread or edit the document directly.  The deadline for submission is September 1st, so if you have comments please submit them by next Friday, August 27th.  I will do my best to synthesize comments into something coherent.

PDF version attached and available online:

http://bit.ly/PCSBI_DIYbio_PDF

Editable version available via a Google doc here: 
http://bit.ly/PCSBI_DIYbio_edit

Many thanks,
Jason Bobe

[Bryan Bishop]

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Jason Bobe wrote:
> How can you help?  One area that I could really use help from the community
> is to hear your ideas about would you would like for the commission to
> recommend to the president in terms of DIYbio and amateur /
> non-institutional practice in the life sciences?  The commission has been
> asked to "develop recommendations about any actions the Federal government
> should take to ensure that America reaps the benefits of this developing
> field of science while identifying appropriate ethical boundaries and
> minimizing identified risks.”  We could conclude the letter with our own
> recommendation for the commission to consider.

Just as a reminder there was a transcript that somewhat matches what
was being talked about:

http://gnusha.org/transcripts/open-science-summit-2010/diybio-bioethics-commission.html
and previous stuff here:
http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/browse_thread/thread/7dad27a5b3810f84
http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/browse_thread/thread/08b5da86b61a8154

Some relevant excerpts and my suggestions below:

"""
innovation incentives, for an ethics commission? Garage biology,
innovation, small businesses, it's the ethics of innovation. I would
like to see the endorsement by the commission of garage biology, maybe
targeted towards high schools, and ti would be great if the rest of
the government could support it. Soemthing that's like, dear
president's bioethics commission, would you please assess the
tradition of innovation in America's history, and what do you think
the role of garage biology would be in the 21st century? They would
only be interested in addressing some policy/ethical sisue. One thing
might be to ask a question of them. Is there- what is the tradition of
American innovation, and what will be the trajectory of biotech in the
next century? [snip]

[snip] So I want the commission to figure out hwo to overcome the
challenges- and we want them to do it for us. Help us build a culture
of biotechnology innovation. Reference Rob's slide, reference the
security commission, reference Obama's inaugural commission. Framework
or culture of garage biotech innovation. But when you say help us,
then it just means that they, I am imagining that they are going to
write this big report, the action item I'd like to see is something
that endorses garage biotech innovation. They are going to make
recommendations. If you look at the 9/11 commission, it was volumes.
What's the scope? They are going to sort of be policy recommendations,
things that the government that should be doing to address the
concerns that they found through this.. they could say that the EPA
monitors all garage innovation, it's not ethical, but they might say
it. This is the issue, we recommend that the government and the office
of the whitehouse create a new presidential thing, that analyzes the
religious aspects of synthetic biology. It will be things like that.
Congress and the Whitehouse will say FU or we're going to do it.
There's no authority, they are just recommendations. Most of them
never get implemented, the 9/11 recommendations never got implemented
(mostly) but sometimes they do, so it's always better to air on the
side of let's get involved in case they do implement the
recommendations so you get on the positive side. It's beyond just
endorsing garage biotech. This idea of enabling this culture of this,
is sort of, a positive culture of biotech innovation. I would steer
away from I would want this X amount of money. They are going to screw
it up. It's enabling innovation in America, figuring out ways where we
go from being a fringey thing where we're scared to talk about, which
is why Todd and Dave approached me, the only groups who have taken
interest in DIYbio, and having a close relationship with law
enforcement now is that- community labs or anything like that, is it
legal for me to share this with anyone else, can I do this or do that,
and there's all sorts of legalities that nobody knows? If you have Ed
showing up to your garage lab, it's his job to enforce the law, and he
knows it a lot better than we do, and it's bad if the only person
who's interested in this are the people who can put us in jail.
being supportive of innovation outside of traditional settings, part
of that is that we need to build that framework.
"""

The first bioethics.gov commission was more of a hearing about "what
is synthetic biology" and the next one will probably amp up in terms
of ethics. What this is all about is the ethics of biotech innovation,
human and synthetic biology, personalized medicine and America's
competitive interests into the future-- especially jobs.

I don't know how to get this concept through to anyone: it's critical
that we focus on innovation, incentives, prizes (and ethics thereof)
and frameworks that foster positive growth, especially in whatever the
commission ends up hearing from our communities; the current draft
lacks this or anything we secretly talked about on this front at your
lunch meeting. Please please don't screw this up..

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[Mackenzie Cowell]

Jason, thanks for organizing this.  I think it's shaping up really well.

The letter talks a lot about life sciences and citizen scientists.  But synthetic biology is all about developing tools and techniques for *engineering* biology.  So I think it might be prudent to talk about garage bioengineers, too.  We're missing the point if we don't address the engineering aspect of SB.

I wish there were smaller, more available grants for learning about biological engineering and developing biological inventions.  These grants would be a boon for garage bioengineers.  We should find a way to ask for the recommendation that smaller "maker" grants be made available to support garage engineers.  I guess we talked about this at the Open Science summit (thanks for the transcript Bryan).  How do we work it in?

Cheers,

Mac

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[Bryan Bishop]

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Jason Bobe wrote:

> Hello DIYbio -

the doc sez:
"We're sorry, but kan...@gmail.com does not have access to this document."

I bet other people are having this problem too.. could you double
check the access options?

[Mackenzie Cowell]

When I access the doc and click "edit", the sharing permissions are set as "Public on the web - Anyone on the Internet can find and edit"

Mac

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[EJ]

I was able to access the document. The letter seems to cover all the
major points without getting too long-winded, and has a positive feel
to it. It looks good to me. Thanks for taking this project on, Jason.
This sort of reaching out will eventually result in a better
understanding of our community by the Powers That Be, and will help
protect our right to tinker.

[Russell Durrett]

I think it's very well written - nice work Jason. I especially like
the standpoint taken near the end -

'We would like the commission to consider the role governmental
agencies can serve in supporting the dissemination of educational
resources and best practices for the growing community citizen
scientists working in the life sciences.'

-it's about time we asked them to help us make the citizen scientist
environment better and safer rather than just hoping for their
eventual approval.

[Andrew Hessel]

Jason,

Thank you for spearheading this communication.  I think it's very well written.  You've covered the thrusts that I believe are important.  I hope this community continues to grow and bring new energy and ideas to biological science.

Andrew

[Jason Bobe]

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback on the letter so far,
both on and off-list. I wanted to give a few updates about the draft
letter to the PCSBI.

They have pushed back the submission deadline to October 1st, which
give us another month to refine the letter. You can view and edit the
current letter here: http://bit.ly/PCSBI_DIYbio_edit

In your comments, please be as specific as possible or, even better,
if you think something needs improvement, go ahead and take a first
cut writing up your thoughts and I will do my best to incorporate
those.

In a related development, I have been asked to participate in the next
meeting to be held September 14th in Philadelphia. The talk will be
very short, e.g. 12 minutes and so I will cover the origin, recent
history, and possible futures of DIYbio (all in about 10 slides).
Basically an abridge and updated version of my talk at the Woodrow
Wilson center: http://www.synbioproject.org/events/archive/biosecurity/

The feedback that is given at the next meeting should prove
tremendously helpful for identifying which areas of the letter should
be given more attention or what might be missing, etc. I will try to
take copious notes and share those with the list following the event.
I think the event will be webcast as well.

In any event, if you have any additional comments about the letter,
please let me know and thanks again for your help.

Thanks,
Jason