In order to achieve our goals—ensure food safety and promote synthetic biology, we organized meetings, visits and talks with different people in our society. Through interactions with farmers, scientists, NGOs, governmental officers, food suppliers, the oil industry, and lawyers, we clarified the problem, understood related issues, collected professional information, and acquired legal knowledge. We visited different schools in our educational system and used the tools that we developed to introduce basic concept of synthetic biology to them. We also designed questionnaires to collect their opinions and comments on our project.
Team:HSNU-TAIPEI/Practices
Human PracticeOverview
Organization
The five main types of organization we visited is schools, government, NGO, food industry, Law firms.
Education
Synthetic biology is widely applied in every aspect of life, and this is why we think each age group should understand this area. A very special experience was that we went to elementary schools and kindergartens. We developed two app games for them because we wanted them to learn synthetic biology in a fun and easy way. Through promoting iGEM in high school, we think, next year our team can act as a leader to call for senior high students to form a senior high school league to initiate a new iGEM project. We also went to seven junior high schools even in Singapore to share the same ideas. We also presented our project to professors in the National Yang Ming University.
The place we visited: Teacher, Senior High, Junior High, Elementary, Kindergarten
Government: governmental officers and legislators
Because the uses of Ecoli has no specific regulations in Taiwan laws, we consulted government officers and legislators. We were so lucky to have a long talk with the previous Deputy Director of Ministry of Health and Welfare. They listened to our project presentation and spent time in discussing food safety issues from the perspectives of policy making and implementation. We understood the current governmental procedures of inspecting edible oil, and realized how the work consumes time, money, and labor. Even raising fines and aggravating punishments cannot efficiently prevent tainted oil from producing. Thus, we decided to develop a low cost devise (ecoli biosensors) which can be widely used by food suppliers and thus helps the government detect and solve the problem more efficiently.
Visiting these professional people, we understand more about the government’s work and policy. The problem is more complicated and complexed than we realize. Standards existed in human societies cannot be changed easily or else changing them will result in disastrous consequences. From those people’s practical and professional perspectives, we have better understandings about how to change our project to make it better fit the social situation.
The place we visited: Legislators, Ministry of Health and Welfare
NGO
We visited John Tung Foundation which is a well-known NGO in Taiwan. They have great contributions to food safety and tobacco hazards prevention. They introduced to us their work: striving for approval, lawmaking and promotion. Their presentation helps us know more about social issues in our daily life. They also gave us great suggestions, including selling biosensors to both consumers, food suppliers and oil producers. If we check on oil in upstream companies, we can save time and money in investigating and seizing downstream. Non-government organizations are more considerable than government, but they met much challenges on their way to success. We learned their aggressive and optimistic attitude in their work, which is a positive to our team.
The place we visited: The John Tung Foundation
Industry
We interviewed vendors. By interviewing them, we knew that the cost of testing oil is too high so that many vendors in Taiwan can't afford it. And we also visited some food companies to know the effect of the food scandals. We also visited some commercial companies to promote the philosophy of our project. Let more people know this subject. In order to know whether the final product be popularly used, we visited the biotech companies to look for their business advices.
The place we visited: Vendors
Lawyer
We visited a law firm and consulted a Juris Doctor. She organized a team to provide us detailed information in regulations and policies related to oil, food safety, and synthetic biology. She also prepared many pieces court judgements related to food safety. They are very efficient and professional in answering our questions. Their provision of documents enrich our background knowledge related to our iGEM project.
Material
In order to facilitate our activities and enhance communications
we developed materials:APP, PPT, Video, Poster, Questionnaires
- We developed interesting APPs for little children in kindergarten and elementary schools to introduce them the concept of synthetic biology.
- We prepared PPTs, videos, and posters to present our project to the others to help them understand our work.
- We also designed questionnaires to collect their valuable opinion, comments and suggestions.
Cooperation
In addition to telling other people our thought, exchange the ideas and information is also important, so we participated in two activities to obtain others' experience and learn from one another.
The two activities we took part in: Meet Up, Asian Conference
In the Asian Conferences, we met many Asian iGEM teams. In the conference, we delivered oral presentations of our project and learned about from the Q&A sections. We showed our posters and answers questions from the audiences. In the social activities, we had a great time and got acquainted with many international students who love iGEM as we do.
Community
We used Fan Page to dialogue with the community. In our Fan page, we had tremendous amount of dialogue with our team members, teachers and professors, students who were involved with their iGEM, and internationals iGEM teams. We exchanges our ideas, thoughts and perspectives. This type of communication expands our promotion of our project and receives valuable feedbacks from worldwide
Our Fan page: Fans Page