Premium
Bugs
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
hastings center report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.515
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1552-146X
pISSN - 0093-0334
DOI - 10.1002/hast.390
Subject(s) - theme (computing) , creatures , engineering ethics , simple (philosophy) , epistemology , sociology , computer science , environmental ethics , cognitive science , ecology , psychology , biology , philosophy , world wide web , natural (archaeology) , engineering , paleontology
The themes found in many issues of the Report have somewhat less to do with clever editorial planning than the Gentle Reader may think. So it is with this issue, in which we have two items on the manipulation of microorganisms—a theme for the issue mainly because growing biotechnological mastery over bugs has been a theme in science in recent years. An article by Hayden Harvey and colleagues at Stanford University discusses possible constraints on what they call “biotic games”—that is, rule‐governed but fundamentally playful activities that make use of simple living things such as paramecia and even more complex organisms such as cockroaches or crickets. A supplement to this issue contains perspectives on the ethics of “synthetic biology,” which refers roughly to the design and fabrication of biological systems—primarily microorganisms—so that they do specialized things for us .