Team:Uniandes Colombia/Practices
Human Practices
Low Budget iGEM
It is well known that doing science is expensive and lot of economical resources are needed, specially in Synthetic Biology.Processes like PCR, DNA extraction, miniPrep, among others, need specialized equipment and chemical compounds that have considerably high prices and only a few people can afford them. Costs in materials affect the development in Latin American researches in the Synthetic Biology field and the formation of new iGEM teams in Latin America.
Considering this we to organized the second edition of our Low Budget iGEM competition, that aimed to demonstrate that most of the protocols may have a new and cheaper way go being conducted.
What was the competition about?
The teams that accepted this challenge had to design a new and cheaper way to make a normal protocol in the lab. We received excellent and very interesting results, we invite you to check out the process.
Instead of doing the standard polls about people’s perception of synthetic biology, we launched an artistic contest, where each participant developed his or her idea in a short story, a drawing or both.
We had two participants, that each developed opposite ideas about the questions synthetic biology raises fro the future. We chose César Nieto as our winner, for his better structured and more appealing short story called “the human software” (not for his posture!). It is noteworthy that our other participant, Alirio Lugo, with his short story “Pandemonium” made us think about how synthetic biology might merge in political discussions, threatening human life with what is known as “biological weapons”, as well as the importance of regulation in the development of these sinthetic biology projects, so that it posses no harm to humans or the environment.