Human Practice Strategy

Human practice Strategy

The DTU iGEM 2015 teams Human Practices strategy is reflected by our team’s desire to bridge between society’s mindset and Synthetic Biology to increase people’s interest about new science perspectives and safe environmental solutions. Our iGEM’s keynote is to push the boundaries of the current education by focusing on young generation, and make them aware of new science opportunities with precautious elements of ethics and safety.

This keynote was considered and defined on the foundation of the team members’ experience and their strengths. Despite our diversity, interests and backgrounds we found common ground through our determination. We decided to expose our project, its related topics and our knowledge to a diverse audience in terms of age, knowledge and life experience such as high school students, the broad university community and diverse environments through social media.

As project managers we have chosen to involve high school students in our project. We believe it is our responsibility to ask critical questions about genetic modification in biological organisms, and first of all, discuss it! Discussions bring new thoughts, exchange ideas and influence reaching right decisions. Advanced knowledge about particular topics in synthetic biology gives a solid foundation to young students, promoting innovative futuristic ideas and perspective into the iGEM community.

Therefore, education is our central agenda to inspire the young students and let them explore and adapt many scientific tools. Familiarizing society with synthetic biology would inspire a well-educated and skilled workforce in benefit to a biosustainable environment in line of iGEM philosophy as we all effectively participate and contribute to the well-being of our surrounding environment. We believe, education is a key point to generate new hypotheses, create new concepts and proof new rules of biology.   However, in Synthetic Biology one might cross doubts about ‘playing God’ with nature. Thus, it is important to consider safety and ethics, in hand with being open-minded and responsible in the every action as a scientist. Young scientists should be responsible with the workflow of their project and its output. It is crucial to ensure not only the safety of the environment but also our health as lab supervisor. Many of the techniques used in the laboratory and handling of a variety of organisms might be equally dangerous. Therefore, risk-assessment of planned projects are essential.   This was addressed in one of the elements in our outreach as the high school students was to magnify consequences and make raise concerns about laboratory work, project design and implementation of innovative ideas into real life. The part is elaborated in detail in Safety and Ethics(add link).

The extend of the Human Practice

Within the frame of Human practice, we have undertaken numerous activities of education, reaching a wide audience. Initially we engaged discussions with a wide range of professors and academic supervisors forming the outlined framework of events.

Addressing fellow students we planned and hosted a BioBrick workshops, a three day event facilitated at Technical University of Denmark. Assembling iGEM teams from across Denmark, we made more than 30 students acquainted with basic cloning methods and lab safety along with introduction to the iGEM rules and requirements. As facilitators, we believe the workshop was an important tool to educate our fellow iGEM teams - ensuring familiarity with basic techniques. In addition to the clear teaching elements, we indirectly raised ethic discussions by gesturing the prospects and implications of the team's project concluding an increased awareness of ethics in Synthetic Biology. Would you like to know more?

As mentioned - three high school students has been in our team along in the process. More about our HS!    In addition our DTU iGEM team helped Biotech Academy and hosted a 3 day workshop introducing of a group of high school students to the laboratory environment and transformation techniques.Would you like to know more?

In line with our Human Practices Strategy, we also aimed to reach a wide diverse audience both with academic background as well as a segment unfamiliar with Synthetic Biology. Therefore, we involved our team in different measures of communication, reaching other students, both direct and online.    We took part in the Life science and Beyond conference hosted by SBE.DTU at Technical University of Denmark. We promoted the iGEM competition and discussed a range of topics within Synthetic Biology and their potential as iGEM projects. Would you like to know more?

We participated in the BioBusiness Summer School at the University of Copenhagen. Representatives of our team engaged an array of discussions within an experienced scientific environment. The attendance rewarded with inspiring ideas for implementation of iGEM ideas into real life, launching start-ups as well as discussing Ethics of Synthetic Biology. Would you like to know more?

We also used online platforms of social media to reach second-link contacts. We reached an  international and diverse audience through facebook and twitter, updating our surrounding community about our project and different wet-lab techniques. This social media outreach was successful as it accumulated increasing interest and with rising numbers of ‘likes’. Would you like to know more?

Highschool students

As a part of the DTU iGEM 2015 outreach, three eager highschool students followed the joined journey of hard work! By taking part in the meetings, working in the lab and participating in the Giant Jamboree they were given the possibility to experience working on a scientific project and to follow their interest in biotechnology. 

Here they are - the we proudly present Nicolai, Maja and Thea - young and ready to take on the challege!

Biotech Academy (find a more attractive title)

Pernille write

Public relations

We believe in the importance of Biotechnology and the importance of communicating it to the general public. To facilitate this interest to our desired audience, we have established severals channels of communication by social media and public science papers.

Social medias are ideal ways of communication in delivery of both scien knowledge as well as personal updates demystifying the team as scary scientists. In particular Facebook and Twitter has been utilized attracting attention of over 150 followers on both medias indicating strong interest in our progress. In particular the updates has appealed to the upcoming generation of biotechnology students with the use of memes being funny as they refer to a caricatured stereotype with biotechnology references.

Life Science and Beyond Conference

Life Science and Beyond is an annual event organized by Society for Biological Engineering (SBE) at Technical University of Denmark. The aim of the conference is to promote different life science activities, helping in organisation of reasonable study plan and sharing a variety of experience between students.

The program of the event attracted over 100 curious students from Bachelor as well as Master degree with different biological and biotechnological backgrounds. As the event was hold in the main library of the university, many other students got involved into discussions on different stands and during final dinner.

One of the most popular ones was an iGEM stand where our team was able to share the knowledge about Synthetic Biology and its applications. We familiarized others with an idea of iGEM, focusing on open-sourcing, collaboration between people with different backgrounds and creating Biobricks. To increase an attraction of our stand, make people read our posters and talk to us, we prepared a quiz about iGEM competition as well as synthetic biology with some awards! After a few hours our hands were full of correctly filled-up questionnaires!

Definitely, we can say it was a success, as many of the participants showed great enthusiasm and interest in joining next iGEM 2016 competition as well as focusing on topics related to Synthetic Biology during their studies.

Becoming a Blue Dot Project

Our team has after a lot of work been accepted as an official Blue Dot Project at the Technical University of Denmark. This gesture infers that our university recognize the efforts we students put into the iGEM competition. This benefit the outreach potential of the iGEM idea to fellow students and raise awareness in the academic landscape. The increased focus on the iGEM competition promote the interest in participation increasing the academic level of selected participants of future teams.

“The name ’Blue Dot’ refers to the Earth, which - although it is huge - looks like a small blue dot when viewed from space. While big ideas can appear simple and tangible when seen from the outside, from the inside they are often rather intricate and complex. The name ’Blue Dot’ thus also refers to an engineer’s ability to remain focues and see the big picture while simultaneously delving into the details in order to solve problems and challenges.” DTU official site

Our titel can be found on the official Blue Dot Project website under the name DTU Biobuilders.

Ethic implications on society

Introduction

On the BioBuisness Summer School 2015 important questions were raised about the ethics in relation to field of biotechnology. This sparked an inspiration in our iGEM team to raise the questions ourselves and analyze our project and educational elements in a bigger perspective. Looking up guidelines of the European Commission, research proposals towards the Horizon 2020 funding proclaims an initial step should be to contact a local expert for guidance. Thereby we arranged a session with Bioethics specialist Martin Mose Bentzen from the Technical University of Denmark to have a talk about ethical concerns of relevance in relation to our project. He highlighted numerous important aspects to consider and the team left the session with a clear direction to make an ethic self-assessment. The following topics was identified to be essential in the assessment of how our project may affect society:

• Bioethics
• Environmental ethics
• Ethical dilemmas in teaching of high schoolers

What have we created!?

The Synthesizer-project has many delicate elements, which could be analyzed for bioethical concerns. It allows any individual to design the synthesis of a desired product with the intention to help fellow scientists all around the world. With this in mind and the tool being accessible for everyone – how do we as the creators make sure, it is not being used with bad intentions? What would happen if the tool would be used to make disastrous findings? As inventors, are we direct related in such construction, or are we rather providing the means by suggestion and could we be hold accountable for any individual radical agenda? We have approached the subject by this assessment and believe in the importance of this initial precaution by raising thoughts of the precautionary principle - do we dare to release our product and how can we prevent its misuse? An obvious suggestion would be limitations in the presented features limiting the use of the tool for products that are known toxic, limiting the use with a bad intention. Limitations of this safety measure would be insufficient preventing uncharacterized toxic products as these would be impossible to prevent due to lack of prediction. Engaging this topic by utilitarianism, we should not limit ourselves by these precautions as the combined achievement and financial gain by the use of our tool would strongly overweight the risk at hand.