Team:Manchester/HP/Gold Integrated
Human Practices
Beyond the bench, the world educates us on ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, environmental impact and intellectual property rights, information which further shapes the direction of our research.
Exploring Human Practices 08/06/2017 & 20/06/2017
To start off with human practices, we talked with Dr. Robert Meckin and Dr. Andrew (Andy) Balmer to discuss and learn about Human Practices and the social implications of synthetic biology. From the start, we wanted to explore the possible areas where our project can be implemented. We thought of the water industry, specifically within water treatment plants where phosphate is removed. Another possible area is for bioremediation purposes within eutrophic lakes or water bodies.
Throughout our discussion, we agreed that we would need to approach companies in the water industry to establish the feasibility of our project. In addition, discussion with Robert brought up the idea of innovation in water treatment companies, in particular to answer the question: what drives water companies to adopt a new technology? The answer to this question would be important to determine whether these companies would be willing to adopt new technology such as synthetic biology to treat water. One interesting point that Andy brought up was to think about our project in a broader scale outside of iGEM and to think about product design. This challenges us to think about the project’s feasibility and how it will be implemented in a real world/business scenario.
Water Industry
To determine the feasibility of our project, we had a number of detailed discussions with the water industry to answer the question: how does innovation work in the water industry? The answer to this question would be important to determine whether water companies would be willing to adopt new technology such as synthetic biology to treat water. By talking to various experts, we were able to understand the background of the water industry in innovation and the requirements our synthetic biology device would need to meet in order to successfully sell it to water companies.
