Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Story
Story
It was a cloudy evening in Helsinki. We were sitting in one of the meeting rooms at the Aalto learning centre, meeting for the second time since our recruitment in the Aalto-Helsinki iGEM 2018 team. The white board hung on the wall in front of us was full of colorful scribbles and our team of ten was carefully evaluating the options written there. As the fifth Aalto-Helsinki team, we were fortunate enough to get all the initial help from previous year’s team but choosing the project idea was still something we had to do on our own. So, there we were, brainstorming for that one special idea which will suit us all!
After a while there were already 19 project ideas in front of our beaming eyes; a number big enough for the two-month long ideation phase. We decided to split the topics among us for further evaluation. This helped us come up with some solid points to discuss in the next meeting that following week. Being enthusiastic iGEMers it was natural for us to dive deep into the global problems that made into our initial list, however diverse team expertise also had to be considered just as much as available resources. At this point given the heartbreakingly short duration of the competition we had to drop few ideas to die for, for example, reviving an extinct species (I mean…who doesn’t want to bring back dinosaurs?!). At the end of exhausting hours of discussion, we managed to shortlist 10 ideas that could be further considered.
As Simon Baker once said, ‘Time goes a lot quicker when the work is a lot more enjoyable’, and so days passed in the blink of an eye. It was already first week of May and we still had to pick the final idea out of two potential options: Bacterial vaccination with CRISPR-CAS vs. industrial dye. Both ideas were fit considering team diversity, probability of help from several Finnish research groups working on closely related topics, and resources at our disposal. Amidst all the reasons to choose one over the other, one of them particularly stood out; our team leader’s eyewitness experience with severity of textile dye pollution. The plight of pitch black Buriganga river touched us all and inspired us to create project Silkolor.