Our team understood since the beggining of our project the big implications of synthetic biology beyond the bench. We interacted with stakeholders and integrated their advice and input in the direction of our research, taking into account the restrictions to GMM in EU and India. Talking to locals, we realized the means at their disposal and the social implications of our research in comparison with other scientific projects that aimed at improving nutrient availability. Making a demo EFSA board, we realized the safety issues and the improvements needed to take the next step. It changed the design and the overall initial idea, but more importantly, the presentation and perspectives of the project. This summer was a challenge to meet the requirements both inside and outside the lab of a humanitarian project that aims at being succesful, in order to improve people's lifes.
By interacting with high schools in the SynBio challenge, we demonstrated that research and synthetic biology itself can introduce new practices and methods to high school education, improving students' learning and engagement. Strikingly, this change can help put students who have lost their motivation and become problemmatic back on track. Research values such as interdisciplinarity, collaboration and independence are valuable not only for science students, but for all citizens. That's why we have engaged also with citizen science, encouraging citizens from India and France to participate in the direction of our project and putting them in an central place for our research. We have in fact made a citizens review board to evaluate the bioethics of implementing our project. This, and the fact that our product and market target was situated in India, made our iGEM project a true citizen science experiment.
