Team:UChile Biotec/HP/Silver

Silver Medal Human Practice

Demonstrate how your team has identified, investigated, and addressed one or more of these issues in the context of your project. Your activity could center around education, public engagement, public policy issues, public perception, or other activities.

Through a thorough and field study of the community affected by the red tide last year in our country with interviews to mayors, businessmen, labor unions and fishermen, we discovered the main factors that generated the situation of chaos of the tenth region, such as contradictions between the national regulation bodies, slow detection of red tide considering the sea recourse extractor’s lifestyle, serious economic losses and poor distribution of economic funds to help those affected, among others. We discovered that our work already has an impact on scientific and national technological development (of low level in our country compared to other parts of the world) and that can make a difference to people, regulation bodies and laboratories, among others in generate a possible response much faster for decision making about red tide and its consequences, thanks to the generation of our device based on synthetic biology.

At the same time, we invested much of the year in the generation of instances of synthetic biology education in different places of Santiago, through participation in scientific fairs, visits to colleges and labor unions to teach about synthetic biology, red tide and our project, interviews in the radio, and making the first Synthetic Biology course in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Chile. Also, we make designs of workshop with future projections for their work in schools.

For more information, please visit: The social problem of red tide, Our travel journey, The interview, Analisis of the interview, Actual process of extracting analysis samples, Synthetic biology to the street and The press.