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Core Idea of Human Practice

"Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work." — Peter Carr, Director of Judging.

According to the definition of Human Practice from iGEM, each team should interact with the whole society, to figure out what the world lacks and to dedicate our ability to the needs. In our team, the concern of environment and health are the ultimate targets. The crisis triggered by Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) has not only be forgotten gradually by us after the Vietnam War since the contaminated regions are narrowed in certain places, few and few people pay attention to these dangerous chemicals.

Illegal Factories

Knowing nothing about Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) perhaps is not the most dangerous thing for everyone; however, when the producers cunningly utilize this ignorance and gradually violate the laws and our right, it could be dreadful. Step by step, things will become irretrievable.

According to the data from Council of Agriculture of Executive Yuan, we have found out that there are many illegally factories established outside the industrial zones; most of them are set in the agricultural area where is not under governmental control. The illegitimate planets are usually the sources of various pollutants — heavy metals, the organic solvent, EDCs, and thermal pollution, etc. These situations result from the high price of agricultural lands, and it turned out that the peasants need to sell their lands for the living or transfer them to light industry. EDCs are just generated by this type of light industry and primary industry, like textile industry, paper manufacture, pesticides manufacture, plastic industry, chemical engineering (detergent, surface active agent production, emulsifier, modifier), and lacquer industry, etc.

Potential targets

In our Human Practice, eliminating the potential pollution sources of EDCs seems to be impossible because there are countless cases need to be handled. All we can do is to ensure that our rivers and ditches are monitored all the time by governmental inspection. Based on these points, organic agriculture and exquisite aquaculture should be our ultimate goals to serve for and strive hard for.

Organic Agriculture

Take the application to organic agriculture, for example, it requires several field investigations for applying the organic certification. So far, we only focus on the design of EDCs detector, but with our current structure of Internet of Things (IoT) and smartphone APP, it is not difficult to integrate other detectors in the future. At present, we are also discussing with iGEM WLC about how to combine their test strips of Escherichia coli with our system. Then, back to the farmers, the main problems they generally encounter are the expensive application fee for certificates, the arduous accreditation process, remnant pollution in the midstream and downstream, the lack of post-tracking and so on. If we can use our instrument in the future, accomplishing the goal of detection. then it would not only largely reduces the cost but also saves a lot of time, and even executes a long-term real-time examination. For the government, the powerful examination system can help trace the pollutants based on the concentration gradient and find out the illegal factories. Moreover, it can also be used to discover potential farmlands for organic agriculture in order to elevate the land value. Under the fast-growing trend of the organic agriculture in the world, we believe that we can become a pioneer to accelerate its growth, to promote the competitiveness and to make more contribution to human’s health and environmental protection.

Quality Aquaculture

The production of global aquaculture has risen annually owing to the exhaustion of marine resources and the population exploration, nevertheless, the food quality didn’t derive deserved care and been improved enough. Take Taiwan for example, the water for aquaculture is always drawn from groundwater, but the groundwater is highly risky to be polluted by the nearby illegal factories and the fishermen do not have effective tools to prevent it. In addition, Fisherman usually keeps fish in high density for cost down, which results in the serious sanitary problem. Moreover, a large amount of antibiotic and hormone blended in mash are widely used to keep survival rate. In the end, the wastewater will be discharged without sewage disposal. What’s worse, it contaminates the source and nature through the water cycle. If the fishermen could try our system for monitor and bring the information to the public, the customers can purchase at ease. It promotes not only the added value of aquaculture but also human’s welfare and environmental protection. Our ultimate purpose is to increase people’s faith in aquaculture and decrease the reliance of wild aquatic products at the same time.

For these goals, we have visited several institutions, experts, and potential users, looking for the real condition. In addition, we make a piece of the questionnaire to investigate the people’s opinion and hope to perfect our plan. The good news is that what we have presumed before is likely to be true - our project is right for our society!!! It’s a great deal of encouragement for us. In conclusion, what we want to do now is try our best to accomplish this project, hoping that it will continuously influence our world forever.

Human Practice

1. Visit expert

(1) Institute of Environmental Engineering, National Chiao Tung University
-wastewater treatment perceptions
-review our project
-provide professional suggestion

(2) Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh
-invite Assistant Professor Warren C. Ruder, PITT, Professor Wen-Liang Chen, NCTU and Professor Chao-Min Cheng, NTHU, to review our project
-share our project with “NCTU iGEM” mutually

2. Institution meetup

The Wastewater treatment plant of Science Park
-visit the whole plant and monitoring station with detailed explanation by expert
-investigation and sampling

3. Field investigation

(1) Visit to organic farmers investigate the source of water and the used degree of ferlizer of their farms
-farms locate on high terrain or higher altitude than the factories
-irrigating water won’t flow out to other area
-the fertilizer they use is farming residue.

(2) Aquacultural base investigation
-the selection of water origin
-the control of water quality
-the customer of fish farm

4. Seminars

(1) Co-organized Taiwan iGEM Conference
-creativity and brainstorming activity
-team work
-think out of the box
-crossover integration
-deal with the real issue around the world

(2) 2017 5th Asia Pacific Conference
-build up the several bridges of our following collaboration chances
-practice our presentation and convey our project idea to others
-realize other team’s work: find some excellent work and been inspired

Public engagement

1. Social opinion investigation

(1)preference for aquatic products
(2)investigate the public opinions toward the organic vegetables and fruits
(3)learn people’s understanding of EDCs and whether they have the awareness of the crisis and the motivation to solve the problems.

2. iGEM Tech.

(1)spread expertise in our project
-EDCs background information
-related technique
(2)discuss topic with people

Collaborations

1. Government collaboration

(1)GF Competition and Workshop of Ministry of Economic Affairs

-independent social investigation
-detector integration

2. Team collaborations

(1)iGEM WLC: Wisconsin Lutheran College ( USA )

-independent social investigation
-detector integration: E.coli detecting

(2)iGEM UoA: The University of Auckland ( New Zealand )

-independent social investigation
-device blueprint offer: temperature sensing system

(3)iGEM NYMU: National Yang Ming University ( Taiwan )

-photobioreactor offer

(4)iGEM NAU: Nanjing Agricultural University ( China )

-troubleshooting: protocols
-technique exchange: data collection, model designing, and hardware modeling

(5)iGEM NCKU: National Cheng Kung University ( Taiwan )

-Data exchange: Aquaculture questionnaire results
-detector integration: nitrate detector intergration

(6)iGEM TU Delft: Technische Universiteit Delft ( Netherlands )

-shield protein offer: protecting protein polypeptide loop

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 Illegal Factories

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