The field of ethics can provide individuals with tools to decide what it means to behave in moral and socially valued ways. By looking at behaviors through the lens of morals, ethics helps us to decide between conflicting choices. In this chapter we describe some recent illustrative examples in which ethical questions have come to bear on the field of synthetic biology, and then we connect the topics raised by these questions to several BioBuilder activities.
What Makes “Good Work”?
Imagine a researcher hard at work at a laboratory bench. In your imagination, that researcher might be wearing a bright-white lab coat and have a pipet in hand. The lab itself might be filled with glassware and equipment for mixing or separating or growing or measuring things. Maybe there are groups of people talking together in this imaginary lab, or maybe one researcher is working by a brightly lit window all alone.
From this imagined laboratory environment, can you tell if the researcher is doing “good work”? Despite the impressive level of detail you might have conjured in this imaginary environment, the superficial clues can’t tell you much about the intangible qualities of the effort. You can’t determine if it’s good work just because the imagined researcher is smiling or because there are awards hung on the laboratory walls and a pile of published articles ...
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