Team:Uppsala/Engagement
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Human Practice is an important part of iGEM since it’s about visually bringing the projects outside the lab and thereby putting them in context with society and real world problems. Integration between science and the public is key for any development.
Involving public into our project was one of our goals. To do that we wanted to include as many people as possible. That is why we teamed up with iGEM Stockholm and organized a panel discussion on the topic of Ethics of Engineering life and we managed to attract more than a 100 people to discuss their opinion with us. Of course no discussion could run without experts, that is why we invited three panelists to help us and guide through the complicated waters that ethics are. The three panellists: Anthony Forster, Heidi Howard and Cecile van der Vlugt offered a unique insight to different aspects of thinking about ethics in not only our project during iGEM but also in research on general.
EVENT
So we wanted to produce crocin, but then what? Before going through with our project we wanted to make sure that we were actually doing something of worth, so we started off by doing a market analysis to confirm that there exists a market for crocin.
The discussion itself took place in Albanova Hall at KTH Royal Institute in Stockholm on 14th of September 2017. Shortly before 6pm first people out of the 167 who have booked the tickets started roaming into the hall and the talk could begin. From the start it was clear that the topic of Ethics in Science and particular GMOs are a subject that brings in a lot of interest and opinions. It took only one question from the moderators to get the discussion going. From that point the whole panel was a lively interaction between the audience and the panelists. We were lucky enough to attract people from both scientific and non-scientific background as well as people from research environment. Thanks to that we were able to get opinions and insight from various parts of the spectra.
The Topics
As expected the most discussed topic were GMOs and their legal regulation around the world. But we also managed to touch upon topics such as social responsibility, education of public, Crispr/CAS9 or accessibility of science. It quickly turned out that two hours dedicated to the discussion were not nearly enough to satisfy the curiosity of our audience. Luckily the coffee and cookies served after the event helped us to prolong stay of the panellist and ignited more interesting exchanges even after the event finished.
THE PANEL
TAKE HOME MESSAGE
This event gave us more inside look into different opinions outside just iGEM or scientific environment and was a great opportunity to collaborate with iGEM Stockholm. It was also great experience to organize event of this magnitude. From designing posters, handling the marketing of the event, inviting speakers, managing refreshments and gifts for the speakers, this was a great opportunity to try all of these things for the first time and get some hands on experience with event planning. We would like to thank our panelists to participating with no promise of fee and to our audience that came and participated with interest. Lastly we would like to thank iGEM Stockholm to sharing these responsibilities and experiences with us.
Our most important work resulted in creation of the Ethics guidelines for which we used knowledge from this panel discussion and our Webinars which are fully available to everyone who is interested in synthetic biology on YouTube.
We took these experiences and used them in our other attempts to involve public in our project. We presented at a Biosummit in Boston. We have helped and got new ideas during the Biohacking event in Uppsala. We shared our project during events such as SynBio hours which iGEM Uppsala organizes and that attracted around 150 people. Our presenting team took the opportunity to reach out to new Uppsala University students during Student Science Conference where they won the best presentation! Most importantly while organizing and preparing these events we learned a lot about the project and got plenty of interesting ideas to work on.
Our most important work resulted in creation of the Ethics guidelines for which we used knowledge from this panel discussion and our Webinars which are fully available to everyone who is interested in synthetic biology on YouTube.
We took these experiences and used them in our other attempts to involve public in our project. We presented at a Biosummit in Boston. We have helped and got new ideas during the Biohacking event in Uppsala. We shared our project during events such as SynBio hours which iGEM Uppsala organizes and that attracted around 150 people. Our presenting team took the opportunity to reach out to new Uppsala University students during Student Science Conference where they won the best presentation! Most importantly while organizing and preparing these events we learned a lot about the project and got plenty of interesting ideas to work on.
