Team:Bielefeld-Germany/Human Practices/Politics

From 2012.igem.org

For our Human Practices approach we try to reflect multiple perspectives of view and therefore also the political situation and the willingness of politics to provide a situation, in which our project can be realized. So we invited René Röspel, a member of the german parliament, the “Bundestag” to talk about our project and to discuss about the situation of Synthetic Biology in Germany. Mr. Röspel studied biology and is a member of the Bundestag since 1998. He is or was member of several commissions of the Bundestag, for example the commission for education, research and technological impact assessment and the commission for environment, nature conservancy and reactor safety. Therefore he was the ideal partner to talk about hopes, hypes and fear of Synthetic Biology, about our project, its chances for realization, its advantages, risks and limits compared to conventional methods of waste water treatment.

The meeting started with a short introduction by Prof. Johannes Hellermann, prorector for quality development of the Bielefeld University and a presentation by Prof. Thomas Noll, scientific director of the CeBiTec (Center for Biotechnology of the Bielefeld University). Next we presented the past two and the current project of the iGEM Bielefeld teams.