Unhealthy diets, such as fast food or instant food, often leads to insulin resistance and Type II diabetes. In fact, this is a common health risk for male elderlies at South Korea. In South Korea, due to its tradition of patriarchy, most of the males do not learn how to cook. Hence, when their wives pass by, underprivileged male elderlies have no other choice but to make their meal with meager instant foods or salty Kimchi and rice.
In an effort to solve this public health crisis, we collaborated with local social welfare center to launch a diabetes-friendly cooking class. We raised $2000 of fund from KT group hope sharing foundation. Every Friday morning, we taught 10 male senior citizens how to cook well-balanced and healthy traditional Korean side dishes. We assembled healthy recipes from collaboration project as well as from other recipe books and created a diabetes friendly recipe book that we gave out to the participants. Furthermore, during each class, we distributed the resulting foods to other economically struggling senior citizens who live around.
During school festival, we arranged an awareness campaign to showcase the hardships of Diabetic patients’ strict diet by selling two different menus of equivalent composition and price: Sugary donut and grapefruit soda versus low sugar donut and tea. We found out that majority of students preferred the sugary option, demonstrating the harsh diet restrictions that diabetics patients should abide by.
We participated on High School Biosafety Debate Competition. Under the motion of THBT GMO should be banned in School Lunch, we filmed a debate video in which two of our teammates discuss about for and against GMO. Since the video is in Korean, we summarized major assertions and evidences below.
Motion: THBT GMO should be banned in School Lunch
Proposition:
GMO may pose serious threat to the health of teenagers. Recent studies show that GMO causes allergy and growth suppression in mice. Genetic modification is a technology that came out recently. There might be unknown side effects.
GMO can be replaced by natural products. Unlike the common misunderstanding, the productivity of GMO may be lower than natural food material in certain environment. Even if we assume that GMO improves productivity, there are many natural farming technologies that can replace the marginal benefits of GMO.
The increased consumption of GMO may lead to the use of food as a weapon and serious environmental damage. The engineered gene of GMO may spread to other species through mating. GMO can be patented, which means that increases consumption of GMO may lead to monopolization of a few multinational corporation and financial damage to small sized farms.
Opposition:
The side effects of GMO are not scientifically proven. A recent meta-analysis of more than 900 papers about the bio safety of GMO revealed that the negative health effects of GMO is ungrounded.
It is not only impossible but also inefficient to exclude GMO completely, considering the benefits of GMO. Synthetic biology allows us to improve the taste, nutrients, productivity, and efficiency of crops. Furthermore, it is simply impossible to entirely avoid GMO: because they are sold in market in abundant amounts: for example more than majority of beans in commerce are GMO food.
The government’s official acknowledgement of the hazard of GMO will lead to the contraction of GMO related research and business. If the use of GMO is banned in school lunch, the financial investment for research institutions dedicated to GMO as well as the profits of farms and trades company that sell GMO will decrease, leading to long term damage to national economy.
We coordinated a synthetic biology study group, in which we met every Tuesday to study and discuss about the principles of synthetic biology. Team leader Kyuhee Jo prepared materials to teach essential concepts of bio-engineering and overall workflow of experiments to rest of the members. We even took iGEM pop quiz every month to calibrate our knowledge. As a part of this study group, we created “Synthetic Bio Quiz of the Month” and posted on bulletin boards at schools and apartments to share our knowledge about synthetic biology to the public.
We created a small pamphlet that includes introduction to iGEM and summary of our team's project. We brought this brochure to At KDA (Korea Diabetes Workshops), we brought brochures to promote our project and the concept of BioBricks to physicians, who are largely foreign to synthetic biology techniques.
