Difference between revisions of "Team:Edinburgh/Practices/Biohack"

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                 After our meetings with Susan Deacon and Anna Ross, we had a better idea of how our biosensor could be implemented in both the private and public sectors.This sounded all well and good on paper, but just as were beginning to learn in the lab, theory and practice are two very different things; nothing goes according to plan. Indeed, it was not sufficient to simply identify potential markets for our biosensor; rather, we needed to consider potential obstacles that may present themselves if our biosensor was actually introduced to these markets.
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                 By this point, we felt it was time to put the lessons we learned into practice. After talking to Adam Winstocke, we knew that we could improve our biosensor by incorporating software into its design. This would ideally be an application for a smartphone that could interpret the results of the biosensor and provide a text-based output that was easy-to-read for the end user. However, designing an app with this ability is no easy task, and we knew we needed help. That's when we recalled the guiding principle behind the Synenergene initiative: open collaboration between SynBio, the public and stakeholders is mutually beneficial. Thus, we set out to find a way to bring all three of these groups together in attempts to solve the software dilemma, and that's when the idea came to mind: we should host a biohack.
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Fortunately, we were one of eight teams selected worldwide for a grant and collaboration with the European Union initiative ‘Synenergene’, whose purpose is to facilitate an open dialogue between synthetic biology, the public and wide variety of stakeholders in order to promote a mutually beneficial understanding of each other’s goals and needs. With their help, we learned to work through hypothetical scenarios in order to construct a theoretical framework for the real-world implementation of our biosensor. 
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              A biohack is a type of hackathon, which are computer hacking events where teams and individuals come together at a specified location to create the most innovative   
  
 
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Revision as of 11:07, 4 September 2015

Biohack: Encouraging Public Innovation

By this point, we felt it was time to put the lessons we learned into practice. After talking to Adam Winstocke, we knew that we could improve our biosensor by incorporating software into its design. This would ideally be an application for a smartphone that could interpret the results of the biosensor and provide a text-based output that was easy-to-read for the end user. However, designing an app with this ability is no easy task, and we knew we needed help. That's when we recalled the guiding principle behind the Synenergene initiative: open collaboration between SynBio, the public and stakeholders is mutually beneficial. Thus, we set out to find a way to bring all three of these groups together in attempts to solve the software dilemma, and that's when the idea came to mind: we should host a biohack.


A biohack is a type of hackathon, which are computer hacking events where teams and individuals come together at a specified location to create the most innovative


After a series of skypes with the entire Synergene pannell, each team was allocated to a specific supervisor. Our team was assigned to Dr. Laurens Landeweerd, a philosophy assistant professor at Radboud University Nijmegen’s Institute for Science Innovation and Society and researcher at Delft University of Technology (section Biotechnology&Society).


Dr. Landeweerd suggested that we should first consider dilemmas of a practical nature, which we may call ‘application scenarios’. Examples of these include situations where our biosensor provides inaccurate results, or faces legal/manufacturing difficulties. Click on the link below to read our report that details, and provides solutions to, several application scenarios:

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