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From 2012.igem.org

Human practices

Click a subject below to find out more about our efforts:

For science to be applicable outside the confined area of a laboratory, its procedures and outcomes should be compatible with the rest of society. It is therefore important for any scientist to know what factors (public perception, corporate interests, etc.) may be important to a certain project, and how to investigate or even influence these factors. To get the hang of this, our team has undertaken multiple Human Practices projects over the course of the summer. Throughout these projects, our goals were to jointly reflect on our ideas with both the scientific world and stakeholders and, more generally, create public awareness about Synthetic Biology.

One of the first things we did as a team was trying to get more feedback about our project. Therefore, we invited all Dutch iGEM teams to present their project plans in Wageningen and have a barbecue afterwards. All teams attended, which made this mini symposium a very nice event. Also, the foundation of a national effort concerning the Discovery Festival was laid here. [Online video symposium]

To expand our communication towards the scientific world outside of either Wageningen and iGEM, we presented both our general VLP-PnAS project[] and The Constructor[] at the international [http://www.cas.uni-muenchen.de/veranstaltungen/tag_synth_bio_2012/index.html CAS conference] in Munich, where we received useful advice, learned a great deal about current synthetic biology projects and had a great time with other iGEM teams. [Munich CAS Conference]
We were also invited to give a presentation about our project at the international [http://www.rug.nl/fmns-research/csb/euroSynbioProgrammeGroningenSept.pdf ESF EuroSYNBIO conference] on the 4th of October (17:30), where we expect to do the same.

To be a viable alternative to current healthcare applications, our product should be profitable. For industry, this means it should be patentable. Because we can imagine this giving rise to conflicts with iGEMs Open Access policies, we asked some stakeholders from industry how they regard iGEM and the viability of our project. [Stakeholders]

Synthetic Biology as a whole is an exciting new field of science, yet in our experience, little of it is known to the general public. Therefore, we don’t want to limit our Human Practices approach to our own specific project.
As a highly specific part of our public awareness program, two of our members visited a secondary school to teach about synthetic biology. [Secondary Schools]
In order to reach a greater audience as well, we collaborated with the Dutch iGEM teams from Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Groningen. As a national effort, we are cooperatively organising a synthetic biology ‘lab tour’ and education program at the Dutch ‘Discovery Festival’. Held simultaneously in three different cities, a total of 5500 visitors are expected to visit this festival and our stands on September 28th. [Discovery Festival]