Interviews

Purpose

This year the Calgary iGEM team began our project with human practices in mind. While we had established a research objective to produce a biosensor and bioreactor system, we wanted to ensure that our system was relevant to the inudstry it would be employed in. As well, we wanted to ensure that academic, government, and industry professionals' concerns were taken into consideration during the design process of our system. In order to best accomplish this, we conducted interviews with two leaders in oilsands reclamation. We approached a major oilsands company, Suncor, and talked to Christine Daly, an Ecologist who works in Environmental Cleanup. We then approached Ryan Radke, the president of BioAlberta. BioAlberta focuses on bringing biotechnology to our province and develop these in an industrial setting. His experience allowed us to better predict if our project would have any concerns amongst legislators and industrial leaders.