Team:Wageningen UR/Safety/Eight

Improvements on safety

Embracing the public

Understanding should come with knowledge. It might be beneficial for the development of Synthetic Biology and the society if the public will be allowed to follow projects on close watch. Probably even more if this is as close as joining a day in the lab, well maybe by viewing it via a video monitoring. In this way the biosafety regarding human health and the spread of disease won’t be at stake and might still be as fun to do. Our team has set this up and it can be found on the Social Media page. In combination with the, freely available, Wiki information pages of iGEM it could be possible for the public to test if any concerns about ‘Synthetic Biology’ were right or exaggerated. In order to provide the possibility of noting any – in this case: nuanced – concerns people should be able to add these on a Wiki page especially arranged for it. This page should give a clear overview of comments about projects. Synthetic biologists could give answers to questions on this site. This direct possibility of interaction should reduce the feeling of missing hold on Synthetic Biology and, with it, fear about it.

With outreach our team furthermore tried to contribute to make the public more aware of the actual content of iGEM and partly Synthetic Biology.

With understanding comes involvement, this might give rise to a growing improvement on iGEM and Synthetic Biology in general.