Human Practices

In delivering our project idea and general message to the public, our team tried several different methods. Because our project deals with technical ideas related to the actual application of industries and with general humanitarian values that are aimed towards addressing the public, we focused on reaching out to both bio-related corporations and the common public. In doing so, we have tried to raise awareness to the current food depletion problem around the world due to inefficient usage of corn and to our solution of using cellulose as a source of fuel. Furthermore, we investigated the general public’s perception on the food depletion problem and its knowledge of the efficacy of biomedical engineering, searching to find out whether people would consider our solution applicable to current technology. In doing so, we have e-mailed and interviewed people who could raise opinions about our project. Here are the specific methods we took to inform others about our project.

-Industries-

Our team made contact with bio-related corporations that might be interested with our project. We successfully made contact with two companies that produce medical products and fund biological institutions, the Daewoong company and Enbiocons, both of which are located in South Korea. Through e-mail, we informed them about our goal in addressing the current problem of food depletion due to inefficient use of corn in the current method of producing fuel. In addition, we introduced our idea of the plant that would be installed in factories to produce fuel out of cellulose in large amounts. The plant mainly demonstrates the method of application for our experiment idea. In order to raise the E.coli in a secure environment and enhance the level of efficacy of the experiment, we designed the plant and aimed to inform industries about this new method of application.

Our team decided to raise fundraising in order to deliver our ideas to students at our high school. While selling snacks, we created an event that would allow the students who took interviews to receive free snacks. The interview asked questions about the current status of biomedical engineering and of the production of ethanol fuel from corn. After the interview, we explained our solution to the food issue. Raising awareness aimed towards students at our school was a meaningful experience in that students were actually able to engage with the idea of addressing the food crisis issue. Not many students were aware of the fact that fuel being produced from the edible parts of corn was hastening food depletion in areas such as Africa, and many were intrigued with the possibility of using genomic engineering to utilize common microorganisms such as E.coli to create fuel from cellulose in corn.

Our team held a campaign to inform the public about the current issue of food depletion and our project goal. First, we created posters that could attract people passing by. The posters included a short list of the problems we considered in need of solving including the decreasing source of corn for food and the rising price of corn. We also wrote down a brief summary of our solution, which is using fuel derived from inedible parts of corn rather than edible parts. We went around Sin-chon and campaigned for about 4 hours, informing about the core purpose of our project- that using inedible parts of corn could prevent food depletion and could still provide the necessary eco-friendly fuel. The reactions and responses to our questions were intriguing-- most people were not aware of the economic impact that the usage of ethanol fuel can bring about. We also tried to talk to people about our experiment, its applicable use for industries, and the humanitarian purpose of our whole project. Explaining the details of our experiment was difficult, so we put more emphasis on explaining the effectiveness of using E.coli to create fuel from cellulose. We explained that E.coli’s common existence and its ability to live in various conditions could easen the process of using the microorganism by allowing activation in conditions that aren’t as strict.