How dangerous is this stuff?
When the National Science Foundation first decided to give funding to the nascent synthetic biology community spearheaded by chemical engineer Jay Keasling in 2006, one of its requirements was that the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center have a branch devoting its efforts on ethical problems anticipated to plague synthetic biology. One of the most pressing of these questions framed at that time of emergence was that of biosecurity. With the use of DNA manipulation, and to some extent with the opensource philosophy of synthetic biology, worries were expressed and expanded about possible malignant forces using these technologies to harm populations. In this collection, you will find a discussion and contextualization of this problem.
Anticipating everything is impossible
As a programmer, I almost always get the code wrong on the first try. A mistyped character can lead (usually) to code failure where it simply doesn't work, and (very occasionally) to catastrophic failure, like a database deletion. This is what worries me about synthetic biology. Coding errors on a molecular level can have unforeseen consequences, which -- I'm guessing -- are almost always harmless, but very occasionally can lead to an organism having unexpected and damaging properties. How can synthetic biologists get it right every single time? And if that's not possible, how do they contain unexpected results?