Overview

This year the Peking iGEM 2017 team took part in three major aspects of Integrated human practice work.
First of all, we evaluated the possible impact of our work in the “real world” by visiting two distinguished synthetic biology companies, SynBioTech and Bluepha. We then visited both an electrical engineering expert and a synthetic biologist, creating an interdisciplinary communication environment. Based on their feedback, we further designed a handbook for synthetic biologists and a lecture for electrical engineering students. Since it is the 10th anniversary of Peking iGEM, we organized a series of activities to commemorate the culture and spirit of the team.

The ethical, social, legal, and environmental impact of a concept usually unfolds when it is transformed from a novel idea into a “real world” project, especially when it is applied to the practice of production. Sometimes it is too late to solve the problems at that time, which makes a thorough consideration in advance quite essential.

Teams concerned with theoretical projects of the iGEM competition are often limited to talking to other researchers about their work, and in a sense must ignore the application of their work in the “real world”. This is not to say that we do not need to consider wider implications of our work. We surveyed two distinguished synthetic biology companies, SynBioTech and Bluepha.

We focused on two questions during the investigation:

1. When an idea is converted into an application, what should be thoroughly considered?
2. What do we expect for sequential logic programming from the perspective of industry?