For this week, we were asked to:
Design one “governance” action to ensure an “ethical” future for biotechnology Some example actions for ensuring non-maleficence (e.g. preventing harm) include: require ethics and safety training to get access to labs and materials, pre-registering potentially dangerous experiments, product safety standards and testing, licensing all synthetic biologists, create a whistleblowing mechanism for bad behavior, developing a safety innovation prize, etc.)
I chose to present the concept of Open Source Bio, inspired by the Software Engineering discipline. Sןimilarly to how community of coders support each other by sharing their code and auditing it, I believe the “bio hacking” community could also gain, especially when dealing with risky biotechnologies, by sharing their workflows and receive feedback whenever a workflow might cause hazardous results.