Contribution to a global evaluation of GMOs: new epistemological perspectives for risk analysis
Project leader: International Transdisciplinary Studies Group (GIET)
Partners: UMR-5600, INSA Urbanisation and Society Technical Engineering Team; Paris-Ile de France Complex Systems Institute (ISC-PIF); UMR7211 CNRS UPMC Integrative Immunology Laboratory
Human activity, and particularly technical innovation, is altering biodiversity and life on earth at an accelerating pace, despite the many programmes put in place to mitigate these damaging trends.
But the methods currently used to evaluate the impact of new technologies, including GMOs, do not correspond to the current challenges of ensuring the survival of the human race, despite the fact that it is neither possible nor desirable, due to our civilisation's intrinsic dependence on technical and scientific innovation, to stop this advance. The major question of the modern world can thus be expressed as "how can we avoid going too far?". This question cannot be tackled using conventional analytical techniques.
This project thus proposes to complete the traditional evaluation methods with a global approach through three areas of research. The first goal is to establish whether any particular category of actions interferes with the organisation of the complex system formed by the biosphere and the abiotic system without seeking to find out how systemic responses to such interference could be expressed.
The next aim is to review methods for detecting early warning signs of systemic collapse, and finally to determine whether it is possible to develop testable biological systems for piloting scale-invariants (the project proposes to use the thymus as the biological medium).
The aim is to suggest leads which a growing group of researchers can use as a basis for developing tools essential to modern society.
Consult the platform dedicated to the project EVAGLO : http://www.evaglo.net/
Find all the contributions and the abstract about EVAGLO (french langage) :