synthetic biology

Ladies and gentlemen, if you can please take your seats, we’re going to get started. Commission members, if you’d please take your seats.

 

We now move to our final panel of this day, which will focus on current federal oversight and regulatory activities regarding synthetic biology and potential actions the government could take in response to recent development. This is again the beginning of an overview.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you would, please, take your seats, we’re ready to get started. While Diane is standing, I’d like to introduce her as your designated federal officer which makes this meeting legal.

 

Good morning, I’m Amy Gutmann, and I’m President of the University of Pennsylvania and the Chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

I want to thank our panelists. We have had a terrific first day so far of presentations and questions. As someone once said, good questions outrank easy answers. Nobody tried to give us easy answers, and I thought all the questions from commission-members and public were really excellent and will help us a lot.

 

I have spoken to all our commission members at our break, and they agree that today’s presentations, questions, and answers have really helped us.

Let me invite Dr. Kaebnick and Dr. Buchanan to come to the table. We’re not going to take a break. We’re hardly going to breathe as we move into the fourth and final panel of the day. As they are getting in place, the fourth panel deals very specifically with ethical issues of synthetic biology.

 

Our commission is, of course, ultimately charged with looking at these ethical implications so we have two different panels of speakers, one today and the first one tomorrow to help us focus on these issues.

Jim Wagner:

Let’s ask folks to take their seats. There’s quite a bit of chatter in the intermission, which is wonderful. Hugh, you want to come up, so I can have an opportunity to introduce you.

 

Our speaker at this session is Hugh Whittall. Hugh is a scholar of philosophy and politics, graduating from the University of Warrick in 1983, but since 2007, he had been with the London-based Nuffield Council on Bioethics and director of that center.

Amy Gutmann:

We will begin with the first principle of Democratic Deliberation and Dan.

 

Dan Sulmasy:

Thanks. I’ve been a fan of Democratic Deliberation and a proponent of its applicability to bioethics for some time, so it’s lucky for me that I got to work on a commission that is chaired by one of the leading lights in the field, Dr.

Amy Gutmann:

Good Morning, I’m Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania and I’m Chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. The President of Emory University joins me, Jim Wagner, who is the Vice Chair of the Commission, and all of the commissioners, save Raju, who may be on speakerphone. Raju, are you here? No, Raju isn’t.