Team:Technion Israel/Practices
Human Practices
Throughout our project, it was very important to us to keep constant contact with the community in order to educate about synthetic biology, as well as receive feedback about our product. Our practice and policy placed an emphasis on making sure that our product could be manufactured to be fit for the public, both from a safety standpoint and a marketing standpoint. Having a constant conversation with the community, both local and worldwide, enabled us to get the word out about our project and receive valuable feedback that helped point out where we had room for improvement. By implementing the feedback we received, we believe we were able to develop a better product and project.
Jump to the following sections:
EducationDialogue with the Public Other Safety
Education
High School Science Conference
We participated in a science conference for high school students from Kiryat Shmona, a city in Northern Israel. As part of the conference, we gave a lecture about synthetic biology and did an activity which involved groups of the students coming up with an iGEM project and planning genetic circuits.
Social Media Outreach
It was very important to us to bring synthetic biology into the forefront of the public's awareness. Even though bacteria is found and used all around us, such as in food, cosmetics, and industry, the public does not tend to look to bacteria as a toolbox for solutions to everyday problems.
In today's day and age, there is almost no better way to reach the public than through media platforms. Therefore, we focused on educating about our project and synthetic biology in general through such platforms.In order to spread the word through social networking, we regularly maintained a Facebook page.
We made a couple movies which we published on the Facebook page, and which can be seen on the home page of our wiki and in the street survey section of this page. In addition, we made the following video to give people a glimpse of our day-to-day work in the lab and group meetings.
Radio Interview
We were interviewed on the “Northern Radio” by Prof. Opher Etzion, where we spoke about our project as well as synthetic biology.
News Articles
Two newspaper articles were published explaining about our team, the iGEM competition, and our project: one in a local newspaper of the Zichron Ya'akov area
and one in a national newspaper called Yediot Aharonot.
Dialogue with the Public
-
Street Survey
Our first step to planning our project after we decided on a problem to address, was to find out just how much of a problem it is. We took to the streets to ask people what they think about male pattern baldness, its causes, and its effect on men.
Check out this video to see the responses
Product Survey
No product can meet the public's need without feedback from potential users. Therefore, we conducted a survey among Israelis, to which we received 439 responses (and counting)! In the survey, we wanted to evaluate the public's opinion towards using a product which incorporates genetically modified bacteria. Partly because of safety concerns, we chose to create our project using Bacillus subtilis as a host organism, a bacteria naturally found on the human scalp. Nevertheless, in addition to thinking about safety in scientific terms (as can be seen on our safety page), we also wanted to know what the public thought both about male pattern baldness as a problem, and synthetic biology as a solution.
58.3% of the respondents were male and 41.7% were female. The majority were between the ages of 18 to 35 and single.
Here is a short summary of the results:To see the full results, click here.
Focus Group Survey
As a way to make our product safer environmentally and from a biological standpoint, we chose to incorporate the different components into a reusable comb. The comb eliminates the need to use multiple pairs of gloves, and offers an easy way for users to sterilize the components after use.
As we got closer to finalizing our product design, we conducted a focus group survey to receive feedback about our product and its approachability for the user. The respondents were bald and balding men. The focus group provided a great platform for us to educate potential users of our product about its purpose and use, as well as receive valuable feedback which can help us develop the product further in the future. The results were used to make significant changes to our comb, creating a better final prototype to present at the competition. Notably, the feedback led us to create a modifiable handle for the comb, which can be easily adjusted to fit any hand size. To read more and see the results of the survey, visit the design section of our wiki.
Other
Synthetic Biology Mixer
On July 7, 2015, we participated in a synthetic and computational biology mixer organized by Innovation Endeavors. At the mixer, we were able to share and exchange our ideas with other iGEM teams, professionals in the synthetic biology field, and entrepreneurs.
