Law, Ethics, and Policy (LEaP)

How does society achieve the benefits of SynBio while minimizing risks to society?  How can societal values be preserved as advances in SynBio challenge long-held beliefs?  These are some of the legal, ethical, and policy issues addressed by faculty at the University of Virginia.  The Law, Ethics and Policy group engages three broad areas of research: Biosafety, the prevention of unintended consequences arising from the mis-handling of SynBio technologies; Biosecurity, the prevention of SynBio technologies from falling into the wrong hands and the response if needed; and Bioethics, the elucidation of what we should do in light of what we can do in regards to SynBio technological development. 

Math to Microbes to Man

Many problems in biology, including SynBio, are so complex that they cannot be solved through intuition or inspection alone. Rather, a systematic quantitative framework is needed frequently to help interpret data, rank-order possible explanations for the data, generate hypotheses, and (most importantly) make predictions for how a biological system will behave when pushed to a new place in parameter space. This group leverages expertise across the university in different areas of biological computational modeling, including mechanistic modeling, logic-based modeling, data-driven modeling, and analysis of large data sets (Big Data). Members include investigators from Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and Statistics.