What safeguards/controls are in place to protect against accidental environmental release?
This is an extremely important question for this research and as such has been a big focus for the researchers at JCVI, as well as the company Synthetic Genomics Inc. Building on the longstanding and successful history in molecular biology of millions of experiments engineering and using organisms like E. coli to conduct research, JCVI and Synthetic Genomics researchers will be able to engineer synthetic bacterial cells so they cannot live outside of the lab or other production environments. This is done by, for example, ensuring that these organisms have built in dependencies for certain nutrients without which they cannot survive. They can also be engineered with so called “suicide genes” that kick in to prevent the organism from living outside of the lab or environment in which they were grown.
Related Questions
- I don’t want to be pressured into making financial decisions that don’t work for me. What safeguards are in place to help protect me from losing control of my money?
- Is it true that WTO rulings don t allow governments to take the environmental measures they need to protect their natural resources?
- What procedural safeguards are in place to protect the rights of students engaged in the Resolution Process?
