I was in class today, and were discussing a recent advance in biotechnology. Specifically, a working virus has been constructed out of "spare parts" (DNA snippets). This is a major breakthrough. If the technique used to perform this assembly is cheap and scalable, then it would be possible for us to synthesize whatever organisms we want. We could synthesize existing organisms or custom design organisms to do a specific job that we would like.

The class was run by a philosopher, and like any good philosopher, he raised the issue - "Is it ethical to be doing this?" Should we be doing this? A scientist could just as easily synthesize a deadly disease with this method as he could "Happy-Wonder-Bacteria-#5 (C)". This possibility is not far-fetched either, as the smallpox virus (for instance) has been sequenced and published.

This is a pretty standard question. You would think as graduate students, my compatriots and I would have at least have a basic grasp of the ethical issues involved here. You would think that most of us have thought about this sort of thing before, at least on some kind of basic level.

Think again.

I was quite shocked that the most vocal portion of the class did not really seem to understand why we were even asking this question. We could summarize their general attitude with this paraphrase of one student:

"Why should we even bother worrying about [whether it is right or not]? Someone else is going to do it if we do not."

What is wrong with this picture? Why does a sense of personal responsibility for one's actions seem missing here? What is going on with this fatalistic attitude of the advancement of human knowledge? What is up with this refusal to even think about the consequences of one's actions?

The general thrust of their argument is that the knowledge will be gained one way or another, and if we don't do it, our enemies (Nazis, Commies, insert-favorite-villian-here) will get it first. What boggles me is how it completely misses the point of the question. The question asked is: is it right to do this? Should we do it? Whether other people will be doing it may be a consideration, the value of the knowledge is another consideration, but neither really has anything to do with the moral value of performing an act.

Take for example experiments conducted on live human subjects. We will assume for the sake of argument that these experiments are dangerous, painful, and potentially lethal. We will also assume that we could learn a great deal from these experiments. Should we perform these experiments? The answer seems to be a clear "no". Objections raised based on whether others will be performing these experiments or on the value of the research sound quite hollow don't they?

This example is not farfetched either since we need look no farther than Nazi Germany to find this practice in action. It is also relevant to current times in the form of stem cell research. If a stem cell is regarded as a human being with all of the rights and privileges accorded to a person, then stem cell research is not ethical and should not be performed - regardless of what other countries will be practicing it.

These are all points I can come up with off the top of my head. I am not a deep ethical thinker and coming up with these examples requires only a few minute's thought. This makes the fact that many of my fellow students have not thought about these issues all the more disturbing.

The fact is, we could suppress knowledge if we really wanted to. We could regulate how knowledge is applied and experiments are performed. We could think about the consequences of introducing new science and technology and draw up plans to deal with these consequences in advance. We do these sorts of things all the time. They are called laws, regulations, codes of conduct, etc.

Does it worry me that many of tomorrow's engineers and scientists do not even think about these basic ideas? Does it worry me that they believe these concepts are not relevant to their work?

You bet.

And you should be worried too.

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