Team:Heidelberg/HP/Silver

Silver Medal Criteria
Encourage, talk, educate and reflect
This is a list of our Human Practices projects that fulfil the Silver Medal Criteria. For a complete view of our entire Human Practices efforts, please visit the Overview Page.


Card image cap

Collaborations

We collaborated with many iGEM teams during the course of our project. Thereby, we engaged in a bi-directional exchange. On the one hand, we cloned constructs for the iGEM team Freiburg, provided help to other iGEM teams (PCR First Aid Service) and many more. On the other hand, we performed an inter-lab study to validate the performance of our mutagenesis plasmids.

Card image cap

Engaging Experts

High impact projects with consequences affecting whole humanity should always be discussed with professionals with different scientific backgrounds. To meet this goal we talked to theologists, legal professionals, safety representatives, astrophysicists, and experts in the field of medicine, agriculture, information technology and many more. Check out the professionals who shaped our project!

Card image cap

Safety

Although phages are volatile and challenging to work with, it is feasible to handle them safely provided that they are handled with good laboratory practice and great awareness. To do so, we informed ourselves about environmental and personal protection measures and created special phage-spaces in the lab to reduce contamination risk.

Card image cap

Education

Inciting interest of young people to shape the next generation of scientists is a core mission of our Human Practice activities. We held an iGEM seminar at a local high school and hosted a school class from Berlin for a course on responsible genetic engineering in our lab. On top, we educated a high school student for a two weeks internship at our lab.

Card image cap

Engagement

The iGEM competition inspired us to reach out, listen, talk and engage with the public. In this spirit, we hosted an inspiring public lecture by Kevin Esvelt, went to TEDx Heidelberg and engaged with the people via our game “evolutionary wheel-of-fortune” and our “Synthetic Biology Wishing Box”. Finally, we created an animated video, explaining evolution and our project in a broadly comprehensible way.

Card image cap

Responsibility

Developing and improving powerful and high impact techniques in the field of directed evolution requires responsible scientists. To encounter ethical concerns and ensure that our project is not endangering the environment or humanity we thoroughly confronted ourselves and experts with critical questions according our iGEM project.