Team:Harvard/HP/Gold Integrated

Integrated Human Practices

Global Perspectives Outreach Overview


Many iGEM teams seek to contextualize their work by getting input from professionals who have been working in the field for years or even decades. However, once teams gather this information, they put it in their Jamboree presentation and on their wiki, but after that, the information sits unused. The goal of this effort was to collect information about the future of the biomanufacturing industry and research from major stakeholders in science and beyond. To do this, we recruited other iGEM teams from around the world in order to establish a common set of questions to ask people from several fields that are essential to the proliferation of biomanufacturing (e.g. academia, business, public policy,), and recorded the answers we got from experts around the world. We wanted to understand how people in different parts of the world feel about the promise, feasibility, and drawbacks of biomanufacturing, so the we needed to have as many teams from as many places as possible participate in this effort. The questions we compiled were general enough that any biomanufacturing-related project could make use of them. We hope that future teams will continue and expand this effort, building off of the questions and answers we have assembled here. Eventually, we would like to see a massive effort to standardize the way iGEM teams get input from expert sources, almost like a survey version of the Interlab Study!

Thank you to all the iGEM teams who participated in our global effort!


Findings


This survey was a first attempt at starting something that will hopefully grow and become more rigorous over time. The results that we collecter are not “statistically significant” and we cannot make any sweeping generalizations about the future of the field based on this survey, but there were a few prevalent trends among the answers that we received to the survey. In general, the respondents felt that the major barriers to progress for biomanufacturing are cost and efficiency. Furthermore, there is a generally positive outlook on the future of biomanufacturing. 80% of survey members who identified themselves as academics felt that biomanufacturing will eventually outperform traditional manufacturing techniques.