Ethical guidelines concerning artificial cells

Bedau, Mark A., E. C. Parke, Uwe Tangen, and Brigitte Hantsche-Tangen. “Ethical guidelines concerning artificial cells.” URL: www. istpace. org/Web_Final_Report/the_pace_report/Ethics_final/PAC E_ethics. pdf, zuletzt geprüft am 1 (2008): 2016.
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Artificial cell technology promises to achieve a revolutionary combination of biotechnology and information technology, which will bring marked social and economic benefits. This new technology also raises significant new ethical issues. This document takes stock of those ethical questions and offers some tentative ethical and socially responsible recommendations about our future with artificial cells. Artificial cells are characterized as self-assembling and self-reproducing chemical systems, that are created through human artifice but not merely by manipulating a natural living organism, and that produce the following interlocking chemical properties: (1) spatial localization of components by containment, (2) utilization of energy and raw materials from the environment by metabolism, and (3) control of containment and metabolism by chemical information that can be replicated and can mutate. The resulting chemical systems can reproduce themselves, and a population of them could adapt and evolve. Narrower conceptions of artificial cells can be formulated by adding further conditions, such as the pure bottom-up condition, according to which the system is constructed without using any materials derived from natural living systems, or the novel architecture condition, according to which the system’s architecture must be fundamentally different from that of any natural living system, for example, by not employing protein translation from genes. But we believe that the main ethical implications of artificial cells do not depend on these further conditions.

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