Stanford University biologist Drew Endy delivered the inaugural Knox Lecture in Engineering Ethics, sponsored by the Tufts Gordon Institute, in the Alumnae Lounge yesterday afternoon. Endy's work concerns the impacts of biotechnology on civilization.
According to Endy, biotechnology can play a role in solving problems like dependence on oil, but the biologist cautions that developments in the field may create new ethical dilemmas with which the public will have to grapple.
Endy spoke with the Daily's Elizabeth McKay before the lecture. An excerpted version of the interview is published here, and the full version is available at blogs.tuftsdaily.com.
Elizabeth McKay: What do you hope that your audience will take away from this lecture?
Drew Endy: I hope they'll take away … that a full engineering education includes advancing one's capacity to choose what to work on. … Second, I hope that people, if they don't already appreciate, begin to appreciate how we're entering a period of time at the intersection of biology and engineering where there seems likely to be sustained improvements in tools, and sustained improvements in tools are what leads to technology revolutions. And when that happens, with the next generation of biotechnology, questions that people are already familiar with, like genetically modified organisms … those are really the tip of the iceberg, and what's coming for the next generation of genetic engineers and everybody else is many more questions, many more opportunities, many more puzzles, many of which are closely coupled to ethics. …
I don't think, for example, that on any one topic that this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do. … The answer we might come up with by consensus or by vote in December of this year — that might change 10 years from now. And so it becomes very important for people to engage and to be constructive and positive in their dialogue.
EM: Do you think it's a good idea for even non-engineers to take a part in this discussion?
DE: Yes. Because it impacts you. … So it turns out that our laundry detergent has biology in it. [It contains] these proteins that help degrade and remove oil stains and whatnot from your clothes. They tend to come from organisms that lived in high temperatures, and so what that meant is that when you washed your clothes, you had to have high wash temperatures.
So [a] company back in 1980 figured out how to get these enzymes to work, by genetic engineering methods, to work at low temperatures. So now all of a sudden you have nice clean clothes without having to go at high wash temperatures. The net impact is to reduce the demand for high water heating across every house in the United States. And in 1980 numbers, it was estimated that reducing hot-water wash temperatures to cold-water wash temperatures would have a 10 percent savings on domestic oil consumption for hot-water heating.
Ten percent in 1980 was 100,000 barrels of oil a day. 100,000 barrels of oil a day is at least five times as much as the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. So one protein that gets engineered and then integrated into everybody's existence is a real big bioenergy saving.
So even if you're not an engineer or a biologist, the fact is, you're impacted by biotechnology, whether you know it or not, and our country is making investments in biotechnology that are smart or misguided or both, and so in the same way that we might talk about the trade deficit or education or taxation or military operations and wars, science engineering needs to be part of the public discussion.
It seems very likely that everybody should have the opportunity to become literate in biology and biotechnology because it's just simply going to be really important for the next hundred years. We have the capacity, basically, to reframe the manufacturing of materials in our civilization to come more and more from biology, much like it was before we discovered oil in this part of the world, when we had to make biology do a lot more for us, but we've taken this detour going through 55 gallon drums of oil, and we have to sort of get back to a more modern … manufacturing economy that is a better partnership with the natural world. Biology's going to have a lot to say in that. There's going to be fortunes made and lost, and there's going to be people hurt and benefited, and it would be good for everybody to be participating in that discussion.
EM: It really seems like [synthetic biology] touches on so many different aspects of our lives, that what seems to be just something that is reserved for engineering is actually so important to all of us.
DE: That's exactly right. Our entire civilization depends on biology. Never mind our parents and, if we're lucky, our children, but the oxygen we're breathing, the foods that we're eating, the clothing that we wear — even the fuel, even if we dig it up, it's coming from biology. And so pretty much our entire civilization depends on biology. It would be hard to overstate that. It's just simply not possible to overstate that. Thus it should not be surprising as we collectively increase our capacity to engineer and partner with the living world — that's going to impact everybody. So you just have to begin to frame it in that context and prepare for it. And not everybody's going to do it, but everybody should be literate.
