ISEB-2004-Chicago International Conference

描述（申请人提供）： 近年来，环境生物技术科学经历了迅速的变化。 废水处理、清洁能源、有毒垃圾场或石油泄漏的补救、城市或工业污水或废水处理不再是关注或研究的主要领域。 现在不仅关注我们的宏观环境，而且关注微观环境，例如人体如何应对某些药物或环境损害，如汽车排放，烟草烟雾，太阳紫外线等。 政府机构和科学界正在解决一些重大问题，例如如何从大气中隔离和去除绿色温室气体，并将其作为固体储存在地质构造或海床中，或者如何产生清洁燃料，例如可以安全分类和运输的H2。 人类基因组测序计划允许确定个体人类基因组中的各种单核苷酸多态性（SNP），这将肯定允许我们确定个体对环境污染物、传染病等的易感性。 这种能力以及其他问题反过来又提出了重要的社会、伦理和法律的问题，涉及个人的医疗和遗传记录向其雇主或保险代理人的访问，转基因食品的安全性，转基因微生物、动物或植物释放到开放环境中，以及许多类似的问题，包括为基因工程高等生命形式申请专利的智慧。 ISEB-2004-芝加哥旨在通过聚集科学家、工程师、律师、法官、立法机构成员和感兴趣的社区，讨论和寻找我们当前和新出现的环境问题的可接受的解决方案，来解决这些科学、技术、法律的和道德问题。 这种基础广泛的会议是非常罕见的，ISEB-2004-芝加哥可能是第一个将这种不同的问题集中在一起的会议。

Description (provided by applicant): The science of environmental biotechnology has been going through rapid changes in recent times. No longer are waste water treatments, clean energy, remediation of toxic dump sites or oil spill, municipal or industrial sewage or effluent treatments, are the major areas of concern or study. Attention is now being paid not only to our macro environment but also to micro environments such as how the human body copes with certain drugs or environmental insults such as auto emissions, tobacco smoke, sun's UV rays, and the like. Major issues such as how to sequester and remove green house gases from the atmosphere and store them as solids in geologic formations or ocean bed or how to generate clean fuels such as H2 in a form that can be safely sorted and transported are being addressed by the government agencies and scientific communities. The human genome sequence project allows the determination of various single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in individual human genomes that will certainly allow us to determine individual's predisposition to environmental pollutants, infectious diseases and the like. Such ability as well as other issues in turn raises important social, ethical and legal questions regarding the access of the medical and genetic records of individuals to their employers or their insurance agents, the safety of the genetically-altered foods, the release of genetically-engineered microbes, animals or plants to the open environment, and host of similar issues, including the wisdom of patenting genetically-engineered higher forms of life. ISEB-2004-Chicago is designed to address such scientific, technological, legal and ethical issues by gathering together scientists, engineers, lawyers, judges, members of the legislative bodies and interested communities for discussing and finding acceptable solution of our current and emerging environmental problems. This sort of broad-based conference is extremely rare and ISEB-2004-Chicago is possibly the first of its kind to bring to focus such diverse issues.