Human Practice

Human Practice has always been a crucial part of an IGEM project. In order to establish integrated human practice with enough social engagement, we performed the following tasks.

Online  Media

At the beginning of the project, we set up a wechat official account, a form of online media, where our team posted articles that introduce concept and knowledge relating to our project. The official account was run by one team member, and articles about introduction of lab safety, team member introduction, interview with a doctor at Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan, an article about what is colorectal cancer, and an article talks about synthetic biology as well as our team’s project.

*Zhongnan Hospital is a hospital run by Wuhan university. Its whole name is Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University.

Interview :

At the early stages, we had two interviews with professors. The first professor is a doctor at Zhongnan hospital, Wuhan. Professor Rui Xu is an expert in treating colorectal diseases. We obtained information about the effect of treatments in clinical uses. The interview covers from basic knowledge on diagnosis as well as syndromes of colorectal cancer to the doctor’s suggestions on preventing the cancer. The interview was later posted on our team’s wechat official account. The interview suggested the importance of diagnosing colorectal cancer at its early stage. Yet, for many patients that Xu had treated, It was too late to treat the tumor and the tumor had already.

Later we had another interview with Professor Zhou at Wuhan University, School of Basic Medical Science. The questions are more focused on experiments and technique development instead of clinical implementations like what we talked about in the previous one. Professor Zhou provided suggestions on the future direction of microRNA biomarker. She told us that microRNA biomarkers not only serve for the diagnosis of cancer, but also help people to improve the treatments; that is , the marker developed can function in both diagnosis and treatment. Our group was at first focusing on the role of microRNA in diagnosing colorectal cancer, however through the interview we realized that the technique can be always developed as a tool for treatments. We modified the methods, and had a second trial.

Presentations:

During our visit in Hangzhou, we did a presentation to students from Yiling Middle School in Zhejiang University. As this is also a part of collaboration, the participated teams talked about different aspects of IGEM competition. Our team focused on the introduction of our project through explaining the what is colorectal cancer and mechanism of how microRNA controlling gene expression as well as cell cycle. Later we went to the Zhejiang Science Museum to introduce our project and the competition to the publics. We hand out fans with information about colorectal caner, tell the tourists about the project, and we designed games relating to science for the younger children to play. The process of handing out the fans and talking to tourists involves a lot of social interaction where we get to know about people’s attitude toward cancer related projects.

Survey :

To better understand the public opinion, a survey was deigned after returning from Hangzhou. The first version was released and received 333 responses. A second modified version was released with changes in the descriptions and choices of the questions so to avoid the equivocation occurred in the first one. The second version is translated into English version as well, and they were posted in the IGEM community as a collaboration request. However, the sample space is unsatisfactory with only 10 responses in total. After all, the survey provided us with information about the public opinion from their knowledge on colorectal cancer to their expectations of the treatments. The survey intended to leave free response in many of the questions to avoid limiting the choice of response, and we did get a few interesting answers on some of the questions, showing different perspective of different people.

Visiting to biomedical testing center

At the end our first trial, we visited Kindstar Global, a biomedical testing center, to learn about  techniques relating to our projects. The sophisticated machines were fascinating. Moreover, through our visit to the testing center, we were able to get a clearer idea how the merits as well as limitations of the testing and prospect the future of microRNA biomarkers as a tool for testing.

Collaboration:

We helped the team from Beijing Normal University to send around their questionnaire on high school IGEM participants. The questionnaire was sent to other team members in Worldshaper system, RDFZ, Bejing Institute of Technology and CIEI-BJ.

Team WeChat Account

We also kept the account on Wechat Subscription from the 2017 Worldshaper-Wuhan team. Every happening event and works done will be updated and news about iGEM, colorectal cancer or synthetic biology will be shared on the account. Since there are large amount of people in China who browse through Wechat every day, this account is our window to the public.