The Code Makers
While some within biotech seek to decode life, others seek to create codes to live by. Jason Bobe and Alex Pearlman have worked on codes of ethics within Community Biology at different stages of its development. A decade ago, when the movement was still inchoate, Jason co-organized the “Continental Congress,” a meeting of community biology lab leaders to draft a shared set of values. These codes became the moral backbone of the nascent movement. Eight years later, when the movement had spread across the globe, Alex Pearlman led an effort to revisit these principles at the Global Community Bio Summit. Surprisingly, her group recast the earlier declarations as a set of questions. As biodesign emerges as a practice, does it require a code of ethics? And if so, what are lessons from the code makers?
We asked the same set of questions to Alex and Jason. Below is what Alex said. Click here to read Jason’s answers.
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Alex Pearlman is an award-winning journalist and a bioethicist. She is a Research Affiliate at the Community Biotechnology Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, and a researcher in the Wexler Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies ethics and policy issues in Community Bio. She has been published in Stat, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, Neo.Life, Vice, and elsewhere.
Biodesigned.
You’ve been developing codes of ethics in biology in one capacity or another for quite some time. What kinds of codes have you been working on?
Alex.
The most fun code I helped develop was a code for human augmentation technologies. A little over a dozen biohackers, ethics scholars, and body modification activists met at DEFCON in Las Vegas in 2019 with the express purpose of getting feedback on a draft code of ethics for self-directed human enhancement and augmentation.
The draft itself was already years in the making, but this particular meeting stands out to me as one of the best discussions on codes, ethics, independent research, and what designing the future might look like. We met in a private back room of the PF Changs at the Planet Hollywood Casino. There was red lighting, laughter, excitement and a demonstration of the PegLeg, an implanted device highlighting the real time urgency of the conversation at hand.
B.
Why are codes of ethics important to you and why should they be important to the rest of us?
A.
Codes of ethics communicate the shared values of a community and can act as a beacon for people who are aligned with the group’s values and might want to join. To me, a community should be able to point to something that simply states, “this is what we do and this is what we don’t do.” It can be the terms by which you hold your comrades accountable, and vice versa.
B.
You’ve helped develop a code of ethics for the Community Biology movement. What were your influences in developing the code, and what surprised you in their creation?
A.
The most surprising thing for me was that the document we developed at the Global Community Bio Summit in 2019 didn’t resemble a code at all. Instead, the Ethics Document 1.0 is a choose-your-own-adventure-style activity. It prompts the user to think critically about the ways they can produce ethical work. It’s interactive and much more personal than the average code of ethics, which is usually stagnant and boring. This also means that two groups using the Ethics Document to make their own codes might end up with radically differing results! But, that’s what makes it special and what I think makes it work for community biology.
B.
As technology evolves, how often should a code of ethics be reconsidered and revised?
A.
This is a tricky question, because some technologies are evolving faster than others! I think annual reconsideration of a code is too often and every decade is too long. So the sweet spot is probably between three and seven years, depending on the growth of the community and the pace of changes in technology.
Cite This Essay
Pearlman, Alex. “The Code Makers.” Biodesigned: Issue 9, 11 November, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].