Collaborations

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." – Helen Keller.

We were lucky that a road to strong collaborations had already presented itself to us in the early phases. Due to the success of earlier DTU Biobuilders teams, we had the immense pleasure of hosting the annual DTU BioBrick Tutorial for the Nordic teams. We also owe our thanks to Lynn J. Rothschild approaching us with not only a project, but a chance to collaborate with the strong and competent team from Stanford-Brown-RISD across the world. However, we also wanted to see how far our own collaborative skills could take us and thus our combined work with the University of Copenhagen began. As the Lund team from Sweden were the successful winners of the Nordic iGEM Conference in 2017, we had the amazing opportunity of visiting Lund for this event in June together with a lot of familiar and new faces.

The question of why we want to travel to Mars

University of Copenhagen & Exeter

For the Human Practices part of the project, we decided quite early on to do a collaboration with the University of Copenhagen and their iGEM team. Our universities are already tightly bound together and seeing as we both did space-related projects and were familiar with each other and our respective projects, due to having met at the BioBrick Tutorial and later at the Nordic iGEM Conference, it made perfect sense to have our teams meet with the aim to elevate the ambitions of our respective human practices projects by joining forces. We agreed that it would be fun to explore a new side of our natural science-brains and write a report founded in the humanities. We found that this was quite unusual in previous iGEM space projects and therefore we found it relevant to question issues related to space travel in a new way. The University of Exeter had reached out to do a space-related human practices project and together, we decided to do a three-part space-related humanities report, with each university exploring the same overall issue on the basis of different fields. DTU engaged in history, UCopenhagen in rhetoric, and Exeter in ethics.

We knew quite early on that we wanted the report to cover the possibility of colonization on Mars. At DTU, we were intrigued to look retrospectively at the space race that lead to the moon landing and to look into the political situation at the time, in order to draw parallels to what might need to happen now to land a manned mission on Mars. The pressing matter would subsequently be what to do when we do land a mission on Mars by looking at previous colonization and imperialism and look into some of the driving factors of that era.

Brainstorming was a big part of our first Skype meetings, and because of our early start, our discussions managed to shape parts of each others Human Practice projects. We continuously separated to do research and met online to discuss our findings in relation to the further development of the project. This way, we slowly found a common angle for the project which ended up being “why colonize Mars?”. We would structure the report so that it discussed the issues in different ways: explaining, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating. We sorted the report in a structured manner. Firstly, exploring previous events in history and relating them to Mars colonization, then analyzing rhetorically the most cogent arguments for and against Mars colonization, and finally discussing the ethical implications of Mars colonization. We would do all of this while also determining the current measures set in place to prevent contamination on Mars, and other extraterrestrial environments.

You can read the report here.

All in all, our collaboration has been a huge success, where we have gotten the opportunity to work on our projects in a completely different way, and perhaps more importantly, worked with other incredible universities and people. Thank you Frida, Victoria, and Matt!

As UCopenhagen got the offer to participate at Københavns Kulturnat (the biggest cultural event in Copenhagen, translates to “Copenhagen Culture Night”), they decided to extend the Danish-based part of the collaboration to include that event as well. This has enabled us to reach a large number of people to discuss our report.

Discussing the road to Mars

Stanford-Brown-RISD

The supervisor of the Stanford-Brown-RISD (SBR) team, Lynn J. Rothschild, approached us back in the early days of the team with a project that quickly got everyone's attention: Using the mycelium of fungi to help NASA with building a base on Mars. Her own team was also participating in this, but they decided to concentrate on providing the substrate for the fungal materials by using cyanobacteria. Therefore, we have been meeting multiple times over the course of the project, discussing in the beginning what was needed to accomplish the result and which ideas we each had. Furthermore, any problems we had and potential solutions were also brought up.

Fig. 2a - Lynn visited us at DTU.

Lynn Rothschild visited us a couple of times, where she was very helpful in guiding us through what the SBR team was doing and giving us suggestions on what we should be focusing on.

Fig. 2a - The DTU team having a skype meeting with three members of the Stanford Brown team. Fig. 2b - Kyle standing with Lynn and three members of the Stanford team.

Both of our projects rely on the idea of using fungal bricks, and without consulting each other, we discovered that we each had been testing on which substrate to grow it on. We then agreed to send DTU grown bricks to the US, so that they could verify their results on our bricks. The delivery of bricks happened when our supervisor Kyle visited their team.

The importance of modeling the project was also a focus of both our teams. Both teams have created models that describe different stages of the project. Our models can be linked together to describe the whole process from growing the mycelium from a single spore to figuring out how the biomass develops, from how long it takes for a fungus to fill out a form to describe the mechanical properties of the fungus needed to design the final structure on Mars. The illustration below shows the connection between our models.

Nordic iGEM Conference

In the month of June, most of the DTU Biobuilders team went to Lund in Sweden, where the team from Lund University had invited us to the annual Nordic iGEM conference (NiC) together with all the other Nordic teams. The weekend was filled with iGEM related events, such as workshops on how to effectively communicate and work in a team, and a workshop about the possibilities of bioinformatics. However, most of the weekend was spent connecting with the other iGEM teams and hearing about their projects in a mini-jamboree, where we all participated in poster and presentation sessions.

Team:DTU-Denmark/Collaborations