Team:ETH Zurich/HumanPractice

From 2012.igem.org

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Contents

Human Practices

NRP 59

creative representation of the article

To approach human practices in a different way, we decided to inform about a topic that science, politic and society recently focused on in Switzerland:

In August 2012, the results of a five year long national research project (NRP) on genetically modified plants (GMP) were published and likewise raised the attention of public, politic, press and scientific community. The title of the NRP was 'benefits and risks of the deliberate release of genetically modified plants'.
We want to take the unique opportunity that emerged with the end of the NRP this year to tell about the ‘Swiss story’ of genetically modified plants in the framework of the iGEM competition. To do so, we have interviewed two key players of plant biotechnology in Switzerland and reviewed the results and the press review on the recent publication of the results of NRP.

How does this relate to iGEM and our project?

The discussion on genetically modified plants relates as follows to our project: at some point, our genetically modified organisms that form the basis of E.colipse should be brought to their purpose: protecting human skin from dangerous UV radiation. We believe that the discussion about genetically modified organisms that are produced by the rapid progress in synthetic biology as well as each year by iGEM teams all over the world will be similar to the one about genetically modified plants. With our article, we give an overview how Switzerland deals with GMPs.

In a few years, maybe another iGEM team reviews another national research program that deals with the 'benefits and risks of the deliberate release of genetically modified organisms '?

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Find the work we did here.



Visit at Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering 2012 in Lausanne

The Swiss iGEM teams (ETH, 4 people: left, EPFL 5 people: right) at the SBBE meeting in Lausanne

On August 27th, we had the opportunity to meet the EPF Lausanne iGEM team at the [http://128.178.104.170/twiki/bin/view/MaerklLab/MeetingSSBE2012 Annual Meeting] of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering ([http://www.ssbe.ch/Meetings/meeting/13 SSBE]) 2012 in Lausanne. Two of our team members did a presentation on our project to the biomedical engineers and we shared experiences with the EPFL team. We were mentioned in an article by the EPFL iGEM team (in french). Since both of our teams work on light activated systems, we had valueable discussions. We offered help with our Photoinduction model.




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