Team:Heidelberg/Human Practices

Human Practices

Overview

Colorful iGEM. Colors illustrate diversity, opinions, hopes and concerns. Combining colors in a positive way can give rise to beautiful images. Towards our vision of a healthier, greener and sustainable world, our science is only one dot in the image. We must consider the complex interplay of colors: Reach out, listen, talk and educate. In this spirit, we first hosted an inspiring public lecture by Kevin Esvelt, the inventor of PACE, sharing his vision of truly socio-scientific projects in context of CRISPR gene drives. Then, we went to TEDx Heidelberg, engaged with the people via the game “evolutionary wheel-of-fortune” we created and discussed their hopes and concerns. In addition, we gave an iGEM seminar at a local high school and hosted a school class from Berlin for a course on responsible genetic engineering in our lab. Finally, we created an animated video, explaining evolution and our project in a broadly comprehensible and educative way.

Human Practices - Silver Medal Criteria

Collaborations

Our evolutionary approach is mainly based on in vivo library generation by mutagenesis inducing plasmids. To ensure that these plasmids are reliably inducing mutations we performed an inter-lab study to validate the performance of the plasmids. Furthermore, we provided help to other iGEM teams (PCR First Aid Service), designed and performed a cloning for Freiburg and participated in several activities of other iGEM teams.

Collaborations

Experts

High impact projects with consequences affecting whole humanity should always be discussed with professionals with different scientific backgrounds. To meet this goal we talked to experts from theological, legal, safety and security, medical, agricultural, informatical, astrophysical and much more fields of interest. These talks helped us to evaluate possible consequences of our project and pathed the way for many subprojects.

Expert Interviews

Safety

Although phages are volatile and challenging to work with, it is feasible to handle them safely provided good laboratory practice is applied with great awareness. To do so, we informed about environmental and personal protection measures and created special phage-spaces in the lab, to reduce contamination risk to a minimum.

Safety and Security

Education

Arousing interest of young people to shape the next generation of scientists is a core mission of our Human Practice activities. Wa gave an iGEM seminar at a local high school and hosted a school class from Berlin for a course on responsible genetic engineering in our lab. On top, we educated a high school student for a two weeks internship at our lab.

Education

Engagement

Colors illustrate diversity, opinions, hopes and concerns and we must consider the complex interplay of colors: Reach out, listen, talk and engage. In this spirit, we hosted an inspiring public lecture by Kevin Esvelt, went to TEDx Heidelberg and engaged with the people via our game “evolutionary wheel-of-fortune”. Finally, we created an animated video, explaining evolution and our project in a broadly comprehensible way.

Public Engagement

Responsibility

Developing and improving powerful and high impact techniques in the field of directed evolution requires responsible scientists. To encounter ethical concerns and ensure that our project is not endangering the environment or humanity we thoroughly confronted ourselves and experts with critical questions according our iGEM project.

Responsible Science