Boundaries

The FFF is aware of reasonable concerns about potentially harmful uses or consequences of the technologies that may develop as a result of our work. Our organization has likewise given deep consideration to these concerns. We believe that morphological freedom has potential to improve innumerable lives and are determined to ensure our technologies act as a net benefit to society.

No weaponizable technologies:

Technology is neither inherently good nor evil. The same atomic research with the ability to provide a massive source of zero-emission clean energy also carries the potential for terrible weapons of mass destruction.

We will take every possible step to prevent our research from being used for harmful purposes. We pledge to never fund the development of weapons systems, and we will use all legal measures at our disposal to ensure that any system or component developed through the course of our research is not weaponized.

Consenting modifications only:

Any and all body modifications that arise from our research will only be provided to fully informed, consenting individuals. We pledge to do our due diligence to ensure our procedures – whether for the purposes of research or as a finished product – are only performed with full informed consent.

We pledge to keep an open dialog with basic and medical research institutes boasting the most outstanding ethics records to vet potentially risky research, and to work with these institutions and any relevant authorities to police these stipulations if necessary.

No animal hybridization:

The goal of the Freedom of Form Foundation is to allow expression of identity and personality through appearance. We do not envision material being substantially derived from animals, beyond currently accepted surgical and scientific practice (e.g., the harvesting of non-living decellularized scaffolds).

“Animal hybrids” imply injecting genetic material extracted from animals, or even mixing animal cells with human ones. Besides ethical concerns, such an approach is not scientifically based.

Many phenotypical genes have their effect on the body exerted in embryonic development – not adulthood. Attempting to insert such a set of instructions into an adult will at best do nothing and at worst potentially lead to cancer and immune rejection. We recognize this is a very real danger as we proceed in our work.

Should we continue work with genetic approaches (as opposed to prosthetics, bioprinting, surgery, or any other method now known or later developed), we will engineer new gene regulatory networks which are relevant to the adult organism, and ensure that delivery mechanisms (i.e. viruses, CRISPR, etc.) reliably deliver the desired genetic contents to cells.