Team:ZJU-China/humanpractice.htm

Dr. Yuhua Hu from Edinburgh University visiting our team

Dr. Yuhua Hu, the technologies manager of school of biology sciences, the university of Edinburgh, visited our team on August first. We briefly introduced our team and project to her. And she described the project and recent progress of Edinburgh team. Then we talked about the collaboration between two teams, and hoped to build a strong connection in the long run. We are all looking forward to the future collaboration of iGEM teams and students associations between Zhejiang University and Edinburgh University!

Peking team visiting our team

Seven team members of Peking team, Hongyu Xiong, Wenyuan Zhou, Sibai Sun, Hong Zhang, Wenming Xing, Tian Lu and Zidong Zhang visited us on July 27th. Before they came, we thought to work together on a project of Human Practice, addressing lectures related to iGEM and synthetic biology to high school students in Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum. This was a good project and also a rare chance, after all, Hangzhou was nearly 1600 kilometers away from Beijing. Peking team provided event planning and contacted with the person in charge of museum, our team designed and printed the post and tried to contacted with teachers of several high schools in Hangzhou. But due to summer holidays, it was difficult to call together highschool students. At last, we had to give up this project. It was really a pity. Anyway, our team communicated with Peking team happily. We exchanged the project and recent progress with each other, and had a wonderful dinner together! Though we can't collaborate on Human Practice this year, this visit no doubt strengthened the friendship between Peking team and ZJU team!

Terrific trip to UIUC

One of our team members, Xinyi Guo, reached out to the UIUC team and coincidentally discovered that both of our teams focus on RNA scaffold this year. The fact that we are all interested in developing RNA scaffolds as a full comprehensive project made us excited, and we had a deep talk about both our projects and specifically exchange ideas in scaffold characterizations.

Research about Human Practice

We are going to enrich the content of HP creative idea workshop by conducting a research focusing on the effectiveness and creativeness of human practice. By doing this, we’re trying to figure out the relation between humanity and science. People used to think science is a pretty serious stuff with lots of data and critical analysis (But it is only one aspect of being a scientist). Actually iGEM Human Practice provide us a good opportunity to combine a great number of other fields to science, and create amazing new things to introduce science concept to the society. And it is such an amazement that during the past few years, iGEMers from all over the world contribute their effort to explore this perspective. We find it extremely interesting to do research on this topic. We hope to summarize the previous iGEM project human practices, seek other successful cases which add different elements to science projects, and conclude the true inner beauty of Human practice and project outreach. By doing this, we intend to provide a whole picture of science and humanity in iGEM, and wish to inspire other iGEM team in some sense.

Ethic thinking and love project

From the experience of English speech contest, we find it necessary to create a chance for undergraduates to really think about new technology in biology as well as ethics in biosafety. And we’re thinking of organizing an English essay competition concerning about biosafety. It will certainly inspire our young biologists or even the general public, and provide a good chance for them to get to know about synthetic biology instead of receiving other’s opinions passively.

Collaborations with UIUC

Since our projects has a certain similarity, ZJU-China focusing on the improvement of the discrete RNA scaffold by adding riboswitch in order to make our own scaffold, while UIUC pay more attention on finding a new pathway by changing the scaffold’s RNA binding sites. We find it possible to discuss and collaborate with each other. We can help in modeling and they share experience in doing protein experiment with us. And ZJU-China also wants to explore more about biosafety in outreach with UIUC team.

Collaborations with Edinburgh University

Dr. Yuhua Hu from Edinburgh did a detailed interview about teamwork in iGEM project with almost every member in our 2012 iGEM ZJU-China team. We are very glad to share our stories with Dr.Yuhua Hu and participate in her research. There’s going to be another two interviews with all of our members around November.