Team:ZJU-China/humanpractice.htm

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.