01 AT A GLANCE
This year, ZJU-China brainstormed so many fascinating ideas about human practice. Actually, thinking about creative human practices becomes the most effective way to bring joy and laughter to our discussions as well as our lab life. In fact, though all the brilliant ideas from our HP creative idea workshop, we discover the true inner beauty of iGEM, which is, being ethical, being versatile, and being creative.
In 2012, ZJU-China aims to be different. So, don’t hesitate to join our journey with a view of fantastic iGEM human practices.
02 EXPERIENCE A REAL IGEM
This year, ZJU-China made full use of our Synthetic Biology Club. We recruited 60 members throughout the campus. They are coming from different majors,such as mathematics, computer science, biotechnology, agriculture, food science, clinical medicine, bioinformatics, polymer materials science and engineering, plant protection, geographic information systems, optical engineering, accounting, business, electrical engineering and automation, energy and environmental engineering, tea science and chemistry. All of them took part in our annually "experiencing iGEM" activity, namely, ZJU Jamboree.
This year, ZJU-China did a few lectures to widespread the value of iGEM, participated in some scientific activities to display our projects and gain funding ourselves, put special highlight on our high school friends, provided opportunities to others who were interested in experiencing a real iGEM lab life.
03 EXPLORE A NEW IGEM
This year, ZJU-China had tremendous ideas about human practice and actually did research about it. With the spirit of share and fun, here comes our HP creative idea workshop, aiming to provide brilliant and workable thoughts about iGEM human practice for future teams, and trying to develop insights of a real effective human practice. Needless to say, we even try some ideas of our workshop. Well, it went well!
Let’s take a look at what we tried this year! ZJU-China held a special event called "Scaffold in your eyes" in campus, and attracted a lot of attention. ZJU-China created a cute love story to illustrate our main idea of project, then we made an animation of this story, "Scaffold in Syn & Bio's love", in which we even create our own song (with the tune of Jason Mraz "I'm yours"). It is so awesome and so fun, definitely worth seeing! The video got more than 900 clicks within the first day, and we are so happy to see the comments like "Well, iGEM seems fun!", "Your project is interesting". Additionally, ZJU-China thought ethical thinking is also crucial, and apart from the safety sheet we undergraduate researchers have to think about, we left the question directly to our freshmen in their first English Speech Contest.
04 COLLABRATIONS
05 FUTURE WORK
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 efforts 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 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
Our projects has a certain similarity. ZJU-China focusing on the improvement of the discrete RNA scaffold and draw big picture about diverse applications, while UIUC pay more attention on finding a new pathway and 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 can share experience in doing protein experiment. 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.
06 SCAFFOLD IN SYN AND BIO'S LOVE
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