Team:UC Davis/Parts

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To satisfy Gold medal requirements, the 2015 UC Davis iGEM Team:
1. Demonstrated strong Human Practices by integrating the investigated issue into the design/execution of our project:

While we developed a biosensor for triclosan specifically, the overarching goal of our project is to push for more responsible chemical use at large. We realized if we wanted to address the issue of responsible chemical use, we had to go about the issue responsibly ourselves. This meant making a concerted effort to understand the complexities of the issue, learning from the past and present in crafting a solution for the future, and assessing the implications of our proposed solution.

Because triclosan predominantly makes its way into the environment through waste-water effluent, we started exploring our problem space by better understanding how triclosan and other chemicals are regulated and monitored at the waste-water treatment plant level.

We spoke with Michael Fan, Senior environmental engineer, who has been operating the waste-water treatment facility on campus for the past 25 years
We toured Regional San, a local waste-water treatment facility in Sacramento

From these conversations we learned how waste-water effluent is currently monitored.

But despite these regulations, we learned from researchers at The San Francisco Estuary Institute that triclosan, among other chemicals in our consumer products, is still released into the environment and these environmental levels are in fact harming aquatic organism health.

But until there is a regulatory mandated permissible level, there is little incentive for waste water treatment plants to monitor for a specific compound in addition to the tests already being conducted on waste-water effluent. In essence, “no legislation, no market” -- further highlighting the complexity/interconnectedness of the issue- that you can’t just expect one “node” in the network of players to solve the issue.

We realized that all these players are interconnected, but that some players, have a stronger ability to push for change (ie. legislation)

To understand how we might be able to apply pressure to another node in the network we:

Read up on famous chemical regulation case studies to see what we might learn from the past:

From the DDT case study, we __ the influential role citizen scientist Rachel Carson played in raising public awareness and pushing for legislative action.
From the Chromium 6 case study, we ___ the role Erin Brockovich played in calling attention to the _____.

We then reached out to experts to figure out what is and needs to be done presently to address the issue:

From Arlene Blum, director of Green Science Policy Institute, we learned about regulating chemicals by class instead of on an individual basis
From Bruce Hammock, _____, and Jonathon Eisen we learned ___ the need to justify the use of chemicals in products (benefits outweigh risks)

From this exploration, we identified public awareness as an effective catalyst for change. We researched civic engagement measures and identified why these initiatives were so effective in inspiring change. We gathered that the key is in fostering a sense of individual and collective responsibility and in providing a sense of agency thats grounded in reality.

We thought about how we might raise public awareness: who would our target audience be? How would we communicate our message? We were particularly inspired by Greg Neimeyer’s Black Cloud initiative, and identified schools as a likely candidate because:

we believe an important component of an education ought to be learning about ones impact on the environment
and because school is where students learn to think critically and the complex issue of chemical regulation is an appropriate primer for the sorts of real world problems students will be grappling with later on in their careers

If we could fit our lesson plan to next generation standards, schools could be a viable way to get our message out into the public realm. We reached out to Community Resources for Science (CRS), an organization that works with scientists to bring their work into the classroom, for help in developing a lesson plan. Once we got the approval that our lesson plan met their standards, CRS connected us with their network of teachers in Davis.

We then thought: while it’s great that we can go into these local classrooms, having to deliver the instructions ourselves limits our scope. Ultimately we want to reach students around the nation: to change their perceptions about chemical use and empower them with a sense of agency.

To better understand how we would need to refine our lesson plan to make it our acceptable for wider distribution, we reached out to Ann Moriarty, an AP Biology/biotechnology teacher at Davis Senior High School. We also talked to Dr. Chris Pagliarulo, Associate Director of Instruction & Assessment at the Office of Undergraduate Assessment. The insights gained from these conversations informed the second iteration of our lesson plan.

We then took a step back to assess the possible implications of our triclosan biosensor and lesson plan. We harkened back to Bruce Hammock’s warning about playing into consumer fears and what Arlene Blum told us about the futile cycle of replacing one toxic chemical with another. Cognizant of these two points, we developed an “antimicrobial awareness app” [MUNTAHA BLURB something to the effecct of “we wanted to inculcate responsible chemical use, not fear”]

Click to learn more about our lesson plan and app!

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