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Team:ZJU-China/humanpractice.htm
From 2012.igem.org
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.
This year, 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 XXX members throughout the campus. They are coming from different majors. We have members from 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, Chemistry. And half of them participate in our annual 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 are interested in experience a real iGEM lab life.
03 EXPLORE A NEW IGEM
This year, ZJU-China had tremendous interesting 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, "a love story between Syn & Bio", in which we even create our own song. It is so interesting and so fun, definitely worth seeing! 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 COLLARATIONS
Dr. Yuhua Hu from Edinburgh University visiting our team
Dr. Yuhua Hu, the technologies manager of school of biology sciences, the university of Edinburgh, visited our team on August first. We briefly introduced our team and project to her. And she described the project and recent progress of Edinburgh team. Then we talked about the collaboration between two teams, and hoped to build a strong connection in the long run. We are all looking forward to the future collaboration of iGEM teams and students associations between Zhejiang University and Edinburgh University!
Peking team visiting our team
Seven team members of Peking team, Hongyu Xiong, Wenyuan Zhou, Sibai Sun, Hong Zhang, Wenming Xing, Tian Lu and Zidong Zhang visited us on July 27th. Before they came, we thought to work together on a project of Human Practice, addressing lectures related to iGEM and synthetic biology to high school students in Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum. This was a good project and also a rare chance, after all, Hangzhou was nearly 1600 kilometers away from Beijing. Peking team provided event planning and contacted with the person in charge of museum, our team designed and printed the post and tried to contacted with teachers of several high schools in Hangzhou. But due to summer holidays, it was difficult to call together highschool students. At last, we had to give up this project. It was really a pity. Anyway, our team communicated with Peking team happily. We exchanged the project and recent progress with each other, and had a wonderful dinner together! Though we can't collaborate on Human Practice this year, this visit no doubt strengthened the friendship between Peking team and ZJU team!
Terrific trip to UIUC
One of our team members, Xinyi Guo, reached out to the UIUC team and coincidentally discovered that both of our teams focus on RNA scaffold this year. The fact that we are all interested in developing RNA scaffolds as a full comprehensive project made us excited, and we had a deep talk about both our projects and specifically exchange ideas in scaffold characterizations.
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 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.
