Human Practice

Overview

‘Will the world be a safe place if we make biology easy to engineer? How do the lessons of the past inform the discussion going forward? Think beyond just convincing people that “synthetic biology is good.’

Inspired by these quotes from the iGEM website, this year we set out to ‘challenge’ public perceptions about genetically modified organisms and inform people about synthetic biology by planning to collaborate with ‘biohackers’ or citizen scientists from the London DIYbio community to work on a spin off component of one of our modules in a public lab during a 5 day period.
The public lab we have in mind will be easily accessible from the street giving people passing by a view into standard experiments that are otherwise hidden in the lab.

We also have a documentary and radio show planned. The documentary will tell the story of synthetic biology and iGEM through tracking progress of our own team whereas the radio show will involve interviews with international teams giving the audience a sense of the global iGEM community and the breadth and diversity of synthetic biology projects.

In addition, our team member Carina Tran is an architectural student from the Bartlett who is particularly interested in how plastics can be recycled in terms of being used as a constructive material. With her help, we want to explore the vision of our Plastic Republic in an architectural context.