Team:Rice/HP/Gold Integrated
INTEGRATED HUMAN PRACTICES
Our project was inspired by reports of elevated levels of the carcinogen of 0.75 ppb in our home-city, Houston, Texas. After some preliminary research, we discovered that the higher than usual levels could be traced back to a paucity in proper regulation of CrVI not just in Houston, but nationwide. This project, from the start, was closely tied with public policy, water sanitation, and health safety in Houston. Therefore, creating a viable solution to address this multifaceted problem was, by design, inherently linked with influencing governmental policy and public opinion about CrVI as well as synthetic biology.
We decided to delve into the policy related to our project. Our exploratory research, public outreach events, interactions with different stakeholders, and other human practice activities culminated in a public policy draft targeted toward the Houston City Council. In this policy draft, we advocated for adjusting regulations on CrVI to levels that better ensure the safety of Houstonians and presented the advantages of implementing our genetically engineered organism into the city's water treatment systems to help achieve lower CrVI levels. In the process of creating the policy proposal, we realized changing some aspects of our project's design would allow for easier adoption by the city and its constituents (e.g. our choice to switch from groundwater to wastewater treatment and our choice to ultimately use our circuit in Shewanella oneidensis).
