Ethical Concerns and Applications
These enzymes have many potential uses including applications in the oceans, streams, and rivers that make up nearly 75% of the world’s surface. Excessive amounts of plastic float in these waterways, causing the death of numerous marine organisms and damaging the fragile ecosystem, and other environmental and health risks. This enzyme could potentially break down this plastic and rid these ecosystems of this pollution, saving the oceans from years of continued damage. However,there are many ethical concerns that people might have. The idea of using E Coli, the bacteria in which we put the enzymes, could scare people who are uneducated of its very small health risk to the population (strain K12). Synthetic biology is also controversial, as it is debatable whether it is ethical to genetically modify organisms for our own benefit. Other concerns people might have include whether these organisms will genetically mutate and cause problems in the water. Since E Coli reproduces so quickly, these organisms have the potential to genetically mutate and cause unforeseeable issues, which is why our future work might include creating a kill switch in these enzymes, and having them self destruct at a certain point
