Human Practices

What is 'human practices'?

As a team we wanted to analyse and address the society’s relationship with science, and more specifically, synthetic biology.

After researching society’s views on synthetic biology we perceived four important problems that we could solve:

1. Cooperation between scientists is lacking.

2. The public does not perceive synthetic biology to be safe.

3. The key skills required for synthetic biology can be intimidating.

4. The general public are not as engaged as they should be.

Cooperation is lacking

We believe that cooperation and collaboration are two of the fundamental principles behind the success of synthetic biology. By always keeping these themes at the forefront of our thinking, we could allow them to permeate through our entire project whether it was working directly with another team to reach a common goal, or just making software on multiple platforms to allow more people to use it.

Tayside iGEM

We were delighted to be able to work closely with the St Andrews iGEM team, who work just across the bridge, about 40 minutes away from Dundee. It was really useful to meet with them and share our experiences. As described later in this section, we worked with them to put on a discussion/debate on synthetic biology’s place in society (check) to coincide with the world schools debating competition.

Towards the end of the project we found out that the St Andrews team were having troubles cloning their biobrick part. We were pleased to be able to help them troubleshoot their experiments and also take samples to Dundee to carry out the cloning for them. (???)

It was really great to share our time and resources with them, and we hope there will be a good relationship between the two teams in future iGEM competitions. We wish them the best of luck for the Jamboree.