Integrated Human Practices

Overview

We choose to integrate our whole project with an ethical approach because of the importance of ethics for a health theme. This approach was based on three main axes: the source of the project, its use, and its future. These led to in-depth considerations nourished by impacting exchanges with stakeholders of allergy detection, specialists, and the general public. These meetings helped us to plainly understand the allergy context. Since allergies are a little-explored subject in iGEM and since we are not experts in every discipline that was required in this project, we consulted specialists at each step of our journey. This reasoning was summed up in our Integrated Human Practices in a creative and illustrated form with the aim to make our approach available to future iGEM teams. For the same purpose, a summary of every interview can be found in the IHP section to share this accumulated knowledge with the iGEM community.

Introduction: an ethical approach

Allergies are an important health matter and concern, for example, a third of the French population. Because ethics were a central theme in our work and choices, we chose to apply an ethical approach to our project to structure our Integrated Human Practices work. With that goal, we met with Emmanuelle Rial-Sebbag, a research director in bioethics and health law at INSERM to discuss our project. We followed the ethical approach presented by Béatrice Jalenques-Vigouroux who is a lecturer in ethics and sciences of information and communication. This approach allows bringing together ethics and engineering, questioning our ideas, and justifying them.

It is structured following three questions, that lead to three thoughts to answer it:

One thing to keep in mind is that “By definition, an ethical question is a question that does not have a solution” (Etienne Klein, 2018). Therefore, the output of our efforts for answering these ethical questions is more of a suggestion that an absolute solution. The aim is to question our ideas to build our project on solid foundations.

To answer these questions, we had to collect information from people, companies, and organizations. This information shaped our project, from the first choices, its design, and the final production, to its application in the real world.

Each interview is presented for a rapid glance by clicking on the specialists and stakeholders' pictures. They are of interest to any future iGEM team that wants to engage in a project bringing together synthetic biology and immunology.