Remember that line in “Jurassic Park” where Jeff Goldblum’s character says “Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

That’s basically the idea behind an intriguing new program at Saint Anselm College called “The Ethics of Biofabrication.”

“We’re trying to avoid the danger of having an incredible new powerful technology … without guidelines or policies or principles to guide the use of them,” said Max Latona, a philosophy professor at St. Anselm College who is leading the 12-month project.

The Ethics of Biofabrication was launched with a grant from the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI), a nonprofit pushing to make the Manchester Millyard a hotspot for the technology of replacing or rebooting human tissues or organs using a variety of wet-lab and manufacturing techniques. The project’s goal is to develop educational materials that will help develop a workforce that ponders the right thing to do even as it creates this amazing and alarming new field.

The terms regenerative manufacturing and biofabrication cover a wide swath of techniques. It includes the well-established use of stem cells to replace other types of cells, the new field of genetic modification of cells or tissues to repair or replace skin, teeth or organs by using 3-D printing and other techniques, and even the potential of growing entire organs in labs outside the body or in animals so they can be transplanted into human patients.

The field is so new that it’s not clear where it is going or whether it will turn out to be much of anything at all. Doesn’t it seem like jumping the gun to start talking about ethics before it really exists?

Not at all, says Latona. “If we wait, we might find that it’s too late in some cases and we’ve suffered some damaging effects from the technology,” he argued.

Ah yes, the idea that we should think ahead when facing uncertainty, treading carefully to minimize future damage. I remember that approach to life before society was taken over by “move fast and break things” – things being software, hardware, business plans, democracy, whatever. It’s reassuring to see some adult caution again.

Regenerative medicine is ripe for caution because it’s biological, so if things go badly they can go very badly indeed, and because it interferes with the most basic aspects of being a human being. It’s not unrealistic to think that the techniques being developed in Manchester and elsewhere could someday be used to completely alter your body and even your mind – basically make you into another person.

Intriguing. Probably useful. Definitely scary.

Latona ticked off four areas that the group will be looking into: informed consent, ownership, long-term benefit analysis and, in a term that has fallen out of favor recently, equity.

“This is likely to be expensive for the foreseeable future, so who gets to use the benefits? What happens to all the people who can’t afford it? Are they stuck with costly and damaging drug regimens their whole life?” he said. “We need responsible use of resources to invest in our health care system. … If biomanufacturing is extremely expensive, to what extent can we justify using public and private funds to support it?”

From a geeky point of view, the most interesting question is about who owns an organ that has been grown from tissue and transplanted, and therefore who can make decisions about it.

“There are three parties concerned in biofabrication. Tissue donors needed to guide development could claim some ownership over organs and tissues. There’s the engineer whose training, intelligence, lab work created biofabricated tissues. Then there’s the patient, who receives this potentially life-saving technology,” said Latona.

Four Saint Anselm faculty members will lead the project. They’ll develop course modules, then test them in online and in-person settings with audiences that include undergraduate science students, participants in the college’s required ethics course, and high schools students from diverse backgrounds participating in the college’s Meelia Center Access Academy program.

Eventually , the materials will be shared with ARMI’s network of member organizations to support workforce and leadership education.

The cynics among you will say this sounds nice but is irrelevant since history shows that whatever makes the money will happen regardless of ethical concerns. There are so many reasons to be cynical right now that I’m trying to cut back, so I will disagree.

The medical field has shown that ethical concerns can shape the behavior of even the most callous practitioners. It’s worth a shot to try it here.

Not only can we do it, we should.