The International Association of Synthetic Biology (IASB) has released a code of conduct for gene synthesis (click here for the press release). The Code, the first concerned with synthetic biology, details best practice for ethical conduct in such areas as customer screening and DNA sequence screening, and gene synthesis. For more information click here and/or here

Although developments in SynBio have progressed hand-in-hand with an awareness of ethical issues, it is time to consider some of the specificities of innovation in SynBio and the ethical issues these will generate. An area of particular interest is the planned applications of SynBio for human health and well-being. Specific issues on this topic to [...]

Ethical debates on SynBio have so far identified and initially explored some of the over-arching moral complexities that will arise from this promising technology. There is now a need for these ethical debates to change and develop to undertake a more specific and detailed analysis of the specific applications of SynBio, in this case for [...]

SynBio may radically alter how health care is researched, managed and delivered. For example, synthetic synthesis of anti-malarial drugs may soon be possible. US researchers have built a new metabolic pathway in yeast and E. coli using genes from three separate organisms to create a bacterial strain that can produce amorphadiene, a pre-cursor to artemisinin [...]