Building Decision Points Into Research’s Slipperiest Slopes

The controversy around a ban on “mirror life” should lead to a more nuanced public conversation about how to manage the benefits and risks of precursor biotechnologies.

About five years ago, the five of us formed a discussion group to investigate the ethics of working with the building blocks of mirror life—biomolecules that are essentially mirror images of their natural counterparts. We knew that less-novel research within the broader field of synthetic biology has been the subject of extensive social and ethical debates, so we wanted to be proactive about a technology we consider even more novel. Two of us (Devaraj and Isaacs) are synthetic biologists who focus on lipids, nucleic acids, and proteins. The rest are a philosopher of science (Callender), a social ethicist of biotechnology (Evans), and a bioethicist (Kaebnick). We met roughly quarterly to discuss what was happening in our labs, as well as the possible futures of such technology. 

Last year, Devaraj and Isaacs were invited into a second group, a large consortium of dozens of synthetic biologists and research leaders preparing a statement on...