Team:GZHS-United/HP/Silver
Silver
Our human practices include mainly two aspects: mosquito eradication and GMO, involving activities like consulting professional experts, surveying the public, market research, public education and entrepreneurship.
Self-improvement
Since the team members are high school students who have not received systematic training as a biologist at the time we set up the team, in order to make ourselves understand synthetic biology and GMO, we have spent 14 weekends for additional learning, and invited Prof. Jin and Dr. Xu to introduce us the topics and knowledge that we should know.
Public Engagement and Education
We have done a variety of public engagement activities and public education throughout the year, and engaged with a diverse range of audiences. We had directed online workshops, offline activities, leaflet distribution, scientific blog maintenance, teenager education and laboratory open days.
Professional Bodies
We have discussed with the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention regarding mosquito density and dengue fever cases data, before joining their team for field research in one of the dengue fever epidemic area.
Theory of Knowledge
To what extent can human extinct a species?
"To what extent, we can potentially cause an extinction on a specific species in the natural environment?" That is a very interesting question we have discovered and discussed in the project.
For such thousands of years of history, human being have seen extinctions occurred on different species, whether plants or animals, unicellular or multicellular, but they extinct for a reason, they may die because of extreme weather, or great changes happened in the local ecosystems, an invasion species occurred; or maybe because of humanity. As one of the top predator in such a big ecosystem cycle, humanity has always been dominating the whole ecosystem. Not only this, in the recent thousands of years, they have been constantly trying to improve themselves and understand the secret of nature, which we also called the ‘science’. Brilliant humanity has opened a brand new entrance of this world. To understand every detail of this world better, they divided Science into several detailed aspects, which we called ‘Physics’ ‘Chemistry’ or ‘BIOLOGY’ etc. Especially in ‘Biology’, humanity responds to learn, research, understand the connection between humanity and nature, and also the life secret of other living species.
As the knowledge of this world has slowly been revealed by the ‘scientists’ still worked on the frontline of mysterious. We are facing another challenge: Evolution. The definition of evolution that humans have given in biological aspect is a long-term process when a specific species in the world has few advantageous changes on their physical bodies, for instance, more sensitive receptors or longer limbs. As we returned to modern time, we can tell that after thousands of years of progression, humanity has become a dominated species of the all temperate ecosystems worldwide. More specific and more complicated demands have been explored and required. However, under this situation, the interesting philosophical questions about the extinction of species is something that we might not have considered right now, but it would be someday.
A great part of our project is to deal with the potential extinction of two specific mosquito species, by causing the destruction of mosquitos' midgut using Mtx1 and Cry4Ba. What we are really trying to do here is to reduce the population of two specific disease-causing mosquitos in Southern China, since many research indicate that the death rate caused by mosquitos has been increasing annually. Thus, on the aspect of ethnic, we are trying to create a better shelter for humanity with lower death rate and safer environment.
However, when we look back to 1997, Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampton-Turner have identified seven different dimensions of culture as two theorists, and among these seven dimensions, they have mentioned the confusion about the connection between humanity and natural environment, which ‘Do people control the environment, or do they adapt themselves to it?’ Historical files have reminded us the connection between humanity and natural environment. So, right now, what it is? Is humanity really dominating the ecosystem, even beyond nature itself, or we are still respecting it, like thousand years before? If we are really respecting it, how can we ETHNICALLY extinct a natural species? If we are no longer respecting the nature, how long the humanity will keep existed and dominated?
