Human Practices

It is an unfortunate truth that scientists are not doing enough to inform the general public about their work. For this reason we payed special attention to the human practices component of our project this year. Throughout this process, we experienced the gratification of sharing our project and views with people from other areas, and we are pleased to say that this influenced the course of our project and our view on the practice of science in general.

We divided our human practices into two parts: a project-centered part with the main focuses "medicine", "ethics" and "patent" and and outreach part, consisting of "education", "business" and "awareness".

To discuss our project, we scheduled appointments with professionals from various areas. In one interview, we wanted to hear the opinions of a professional in medical device production to see if our project could potentially be scaled up. As part of the health and medicine track, it was really important for us to ensure that this cancer detection device could be useful for medical doctors and patients. We also consulted experts in patent law and ethics. This broadened our perspective on the procedure, goals, and applicability of our project. We also realized that these different approaches complemented one another.

In addition, we reached out to children with the realization that educating new generations is essential if we want to progress as a technologically-advanced society. For this reason, we went to two different schools where we educated school children about cells, DNA, and we had fun performing a real experiment with them!

Finally, we contacted two newspapers and arranged for articles to be written about us to inform a wider audience about synthetic biology and iGEM.

If you want to read more about any of the presented topics, please click on the image above!