Team:Exeter/Human Practices

Introduction

Human practices are the ethical, societal, environmental and business impacts that our synthetic biology project has. Everything that could be affected by our project has been considered and the benefits and risks to each area decided. From the beginning we imagined how our project may impact upon society, evolving our project with human practices in mind. It is one of the most important aspects of our project and determines the success of our project if it were to continue forward.

Panel

The panel involved inviting specialists from each of the subject areas within human practices to listen to our presentation and then follow with a question and answer session. Organisation began by finding the most suitable members for the panel and personally inviting the panellists via email correspondence: Professor Richard Owen who holds the Chair in Responsible Innovation at the University of Exeter Business School, Harriet Sjerps-Jones, whose role is coordinating informal and formal learning opportunities for sustainability, and Professor Rick Titball, Director of research for the School of Biosciences who used to work for DSTL. We then advertised our panel in the biosciences department with fliers, provided refreshments to tempt people, so that others may come along and form the audience.

After the panellists had asked their questions we involved the wider audience and received their feedback also. This meant that rather than having an open discussion with the room and inviting the panellists to simply attend, they were given the floor first to begin with. This provided more structure to the discussion and led the way with questions and answers, giving the panellists the opportunity to first provide their professional opinion so that the discussion was kept as relevant as possible.

Discussions

David Parker from Shell first introduced us to the business considerations of our project and helped to shape our thoughts on where our project could go in the business sector. We discussed product yields, as the more polysaccharide produced the more money we could make. Organisms use most of the sugar for themselves and would only produce about 1% of our desired polysaccharide. Bacteria are better as they don’t have compartmentalisation, have faster growth and higher yield but how do you control their fermentation, considering antibiotics kill the host. We discussed alternative methods of producing our polysaccharides including using the bacteria to instead produce the enzymes and isolating these.

David Parker also introduced us to marketing considerations, who our competitors would be and, since we don’t have any and are filling a niche, which would benefit from our new technology. David Ion from a local food manufacturer discussed with us the business applications of our products to their industry but pointed out the current difficulties of introducing GM products into food products. Their interest was primarily in the cholesterol reducing properties of cyclodextrin and we considered how it might be possible to treat their food ingredients and then remove cyclodextrin so a GM product wasn’t in their final merchandise. Unfortunately we are a long way off of using our products in the food industry due to the restrictions to GM products and the barriers to any food ingredient from a food safety aspect.

Professor Rick Titball and Dr. Timothy Atkins from DSTL met and discussed the vaccine application to our project. The benefits to producing polysaccharide vaccines includes a reduced immune response to the adjuvant and also we are not introducing attenuated or dead bacteria and so people are unlikely to become ill from taking the vaccine but are still protected against the disease. This improves upon current vaccines and also provides the opportunity to treat a wider range of diseases and improve public health.

The meeting with DSTL led us to a discussion with Dr. Andrew Watts, head of Glythera, who pointed out a technology in development that could improve upon our polysaccharide vaccines by binding to a protein they are developing that increases B cell activation 10,000 fold. This would improve the efficacy of our vaccines. He also pointed out to us that even though there weren’t enough promoters for the control of all our glycosyltranferases, there is the opportunity of producing NOT and NOR gates to introduce more variability to expression or potential to look at more downstream expression effectors such as protein modifications.

Our regular meetings with Dr. Sabina Leonelli also highlighted the ethical issues surrounding our iGEM project. Specifically, questions over data mis-use of our technology versus open source ethos of iGEM were raised as well as ethical issues over human intervention of natural life-forms such as E.coli that we are using to build our technology.

Frequent meetings with Greenpeace with Dr. David Santillo and Dr. Janet Cotter allowed us to adjust our project to minimise environmental risks if our GMO and/or high-quality polysaccharide products were to be released into the environment. These issues were implemented both throughout this project and beyond the iGEM competition.

The combination of discussions with professionals of their fields, the human practice panel held early on in our project and the continued development of our project alongside human practice considerations has enabled us to consider all aspects of human practices concerned with our project. We have been able to develop human practices alongside our project so they evolved together.