The Study of Socioethical Issues in Systems Biology
Authors: Maureen A. O'Malley, Jane Calvert, John Dupré
Journal: The American Journal of Bioethics (2007)

Abstract Systems biology is the rapidly growing and heavily funded successor science to genomics. Its mission is to integrate extensive bodies of molecular data into a detailed mathematical understanding of all life processes, with an ultimate view to their prediction and control. Despite its high profile and widespread practice, there has so far been almost no bioethical attention paid to systems biology and its potential social consequences. We outline some of systems biology's most important socioethical issues by contrasting the concept of systems as dynamic processes against the common static interpretation of genomes. New issues arise around systems biology's capacities for in silico testing, changing cultural understandings of life, synthetic biology, and commercialization. We advocate an interdisciplinary and interactive approach that integrates social and philosophical analysis and engages closely with the science. Overall, we argue that systems biology socioethics could stimulate new ways of thinking about socioethical studies of life sciences. Keywords: bioethicsELSIgeneticsgenomicssocioethicssystems biology Acknowledgement We would like to thank Daniel Drell (US Department of Energy) for the initial stimulus to write this paper, and Alf Game and Sophia Abbasi (UK Biological and Biomedical Research Council) for ongoing encouragement to study philosophical and social issues in systems biology. Many thanks also are due to Graciela Nowenstein and Paula Saukko (both at Egenis, University of Exeter) and an anonymous referee for comments on earlier versions of the paper. We gratefully acknowledge the research support of the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The research in this paper was part of the program of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis). Notes 1. See Glossary. 2. In an earlier discussion of the philosophical issues in systems biology, we described two overlapping strands of scientific activity: the majority pragmatic approach, which connects molecules into systems from the bottom up, and the minority systems-theoretic approach, which works from top-down system principles to understand molecular interactions (CitationO'Malley and Dupré 2005). 3. We base our simple assessment of practicability on the proliferation of literature about the importance of systems biology's findings (CitationBork 2005) and the amount of funding and science policy recognition the field has achieved internationally (WTEC 2005). More subtle assessments of what constitutes success in respect to contemporary systems biology will have to wait for a longer-term analysis of the achievements of newly created institutions of systems biology, the published findings they produce and their impact on associated subfields of biology. 4. There has been little ontological discussion about genomes among scientists or bioethicists. Scientists have tended to restrict their abstract discussions of genomes to the metaphors used to describe them (e.g., CitationAvise 2001), whereas philosophers of biology have reserved their fascination for gene concepts (e.g., CitationStotz et al. 2004; see CitationDupré 2004 for some speculations about ontological problems concerning the genome). 5. CitationMcGuire and Gibbs (2006) discuss how systems biology may straightforwardly increase privacy risks. 6. One epistemological point we would emphasize here is that although systems biology does aspire to prediction and control, its predictiveness is not simplistically deterministic. Systems biologists do want to understand causal relationships but these are repeatedly acknowledged (through the bitter experience of research failure rather than philosophical conviction) to be about complex loops of interaction that resist linear causal modeling. Systems biology models will be able to specify the “possibility space” for system behavior rather than make exact predictions of a single behavior (see CitationPalsson 2000 for a good discussion). There are, of course, different strands of systems biology and some are narrower than others, but we doubt any future historical overview of systems biology will find that its practitioners adhered to simplistic reductionist and determinist analysis. 7. While popular forms of holist thinking do exist—the 1979 Gaia hypothesis of the English environmental scientist James Lovelock among them—systems biology in scientific discourse restricts itself to definable systems that are tractable to modeling and simulation. Overall, these systems are rather resistant to the language of goals and intention that usually accompanies the more mystic views of large systems (CitationVolk 2006). 8. For further discussion, see O'Malley and Dupré (in press). 9. Popularly cited examples of metagenomics include the vast inventory of genes in the Sargasso Sea studies by CitationVenter et al. (2004) and the analysis of the metagenome of the microbial community living in a highly acidic mining site by CitationTyson et al. (2004). 10. This attribution of design is not a metaphysical one (as intelligent design “theory” is) but an epistemological approach to system understanding that attracts a different range of criticisms (see CitationO'Malley and Dupré 2005). 11. Other “systems” patent applications, however, appear to revert to traditional composition of matter patents and claim interacting molecules rather than anything obviously informational (see CitationAllarakhia and Wensley 2005, Table 2). 12. Open source is one such collaborative ownership regime that could be considered. In bioinformatics, much existing software is open source and this approach is also the case for emerging systems biology software (such as Systems Biology Mark-up Language). Research findings made at the laboratory bench may be more difficult to fit into this mold, however (see CitationRai 2005). 13. Even very sophisticated socially contextualized arguments often slip into a simple biology-versus-society (or culture) framework (e.g., CitationLevy and Lotz 2005). 14. We are currently engaged in a sociological study of the institutionalization of systems biology in the United Kingdom, United States and Japan.