Team:IISc-Bangalore/Philosophy
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Open Science
Academia today is stuck in a rut — though we live in the 21st century with access to amazing technology that allows us to access information in fractions of a second, most of research articles are hidden from us by artificial barriers created by journals for profit in the guise of protecting high-quality science. We are fortunate enough to have institutional access to most journals, so we don’t feel the pinch - except while traveling.
Still, we know only too well the vital importance of promoting open science, especially in these days, with big publishers pushing back against the Cost of Knowledge http://thecostofknowledge.com/ and other open access movements. We have promoted open science at each school we visited, especially in the context of synthetic biology and the work of iGEM itself.
At the iGEM-India meetup, we participated in an interactive discussion with Robert Garcia, an open science advocate, and an advisor of the Pune iGEM team, where we proposed methods of spreading the idea of BioHacker spaces to India.
In Hardware, we opted to make all our hardware designs open source despite being told that some of our designs were patentable. We were also mindful of the fact that some of the things we made would not have been possible without the generosity of the contributors to the open-source libraries we needed.
Community
Science is an online community, and we came to realise this when we saw how much we had learned from forums such as researchgate and the subreddit r/labrats, in terms of protocols, advice and pure scientific camaraderie. We also shocked at the generosity of busy researchers such as Mikhail Shapiro, who took the time to send us materials, and even protocols related to then unpublished experiments.
We tried to give back to the community through our outreach to other iGEM teams, at schools, and especially among students at our own university.
In hardware, especially, we tried to involve younger students in the work that we were doing, to the extent that we had plenty of freshmen, such as Arpit, to test our devices and documentation on.
Honesty
It’s easy to be honest when things go your way. But for a long time, our experiments turned up only failures, and we learned that honesty is about the little things. It’s about waiting for that gel band to resolve clearly before you photograph, even though you’d love to claim that indistinct mass as the positive result you need. It’s about adding that extra line to the documentation, about remembering to tape the test tube for solidity, even though you think no one will ever bother. We were fortunate enough to have mentors who expected and insisted on the highest standards of academic integrity, and that philosophy soon came to permeate the team.
Economy
In India, ordering complex equipment always comes with that extra twinge -It’s so expensive! Could I possibly make do without? - that we in our Hardware team tried our best to eliminate. It wasn’t easy. There were several occasions, such as the design of the fluidic multiplexer, and the test tube holder, where we had the opportunity to throw money at our design problems to make them go away. But we knew how that would cut off access to our device from the people who needed it most, and so we persevered. The result of our philosophy of economy - GCODe costs less than a hundredth as much as the industry standard for automated cell culture systems.
Learning
Over the course of our iGEM journey, we've learnt a tremendous number of things, not limited strictly to synthetic biology, hardware or software. The need for proper documentation of our research and the importance of independent replicates were firmly impressed upon us through our work on iFLOAT. We also learnt how to manage time effectively to balance a huge number of responsibilities — attending lectures, lab work, documentation and uploading data. Getting approvals and managing finances taught us how to wade through thickets of bureaucracy, and come away unscathed- for the most part. Our philosophy of learning meant that each team member explained his struggles and successes to the whole team, whether via chat message or in person - ensuring the learning was multiplied tenfold.
