Team:HebrewU/Human Practices
Hebrew- Project
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- Human Practices
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- Judging
In October 2017, our small team began exploring global issues that we wanted to try solving through synthetic biology. Many of us are students of Agroecology and Plant Sciences, and so, it became clear that our teams’ passion for the environment would guide our decision, eventually leading us to a project in bioremediation. While searching for a project related to the remediation of organic pollutants, we met Professor Assaf Mosquna, a molecular and biochemical plant biologist, who became our beloved PI. In one of our consults with him, the subject of Dioxin pollution arose when one of our team members stumbled upon the story of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
An ongoing clean-up effort, the danger and scale of TCDD contamination through Agent Orange distribution in the 1960's served as a central motivating factor in our decision to tackle this particular organic pollutant. But we quickly found out that Dioxin pollution is even more widespread than just South Vietnam. This type of pollutant is considered ubiquitous; found in small concentrations nearly everywhere on our planet's soil, in its water sources, and even in our atmosphere.
As Dioxins are almost entirely a result of human pollution, and are a pervasive problem that will not disappear without human intervention, we could not turn away from this project. As soon as that meeting was over, our team hit the ground running.
With a theoretical model for our solution in place, we began investigating the feasibility of implementing a solution such as ours. We needed to know that our model was, at least potentially, leading to a solution that works in practice. One that could pass through bureaucratic red-tape and make it to contaminated soils with further development.
To do this, we felt that nothing could give us a better indication of our potential than speaking directly with experts and leaders. We interviewed and consulted with experts on TCDD pollution, business leaders of the Agro-Tech industry, and community leaders that helped us understand how the world might view our genetically modified solution.
Based on the information that we received, we concluded that implementing our solution in an open-source format is the most effective approach. Our goal is to use our research to help clean-up TCDD pollution across the globe. In an open-source format, everyone will have free and easy access to our findings and will be able to implement this solution by simply following our collected protocols.
Regulation and global aspects
Setting aside the ubiquitous nature of Dioxin pollution and specific tragedies that occurred (such as Agent Orange), we found that these types of pollutants are considered a current health hazard in many developing countries that have not installed legitimate regulatory constructs to prevent Dioxin creation or exposure. Among them, and some developed countries as well, there are also countries that may have taken the step to write laws [to prevent this from happening], but do not enforce those laws, or simply don't perform inspections.
Here we have assembled summaries of the main dioxin contamination sources on each continent, the latest worldwide agreements on dioxin emission levels and local stories about how and if those regulations are being enforced.
Public Engagement
We are aware that, to the general public, the topic of GMO's is widely misunderstood and even considered controversial. We are concerned that solutions such as ours might be sidelined simply because of the bad name that GMO's possess in the public eye. We believe that this would be a grave mistake, not just concerning our research project, but also the myriad projects that utilize synthetic biology to make our world a better place.
For this reason, we decided to formulate educational programs, accessible to the public, that would introduce young students and their teachers to the world of synthetic biology through our eyes - the eyes of environmental researchers.
Click on the link below to view our educational programs.
Not long after reading the book, we established a correspondence with its authors: Dr. Charles Bailey and Dr. Le Ke Son. Over a period of several months, we had bombarded them with our thoughts and questions in order to clarify several things. For one, we wanted to understand how effective the current solutions, i.e. soil incineration, are at treating the problem. Dr. Bailey had made it clear that soil incineration is highly effective at destroying the dioxins, but that efforts are only being made at the three major Air Force bases that served as the hubs for Agent Orange handling in Vietnam throughout the war. Not surprisingly, the area around these airports contain the most highly contaminated soils and are located near residential areas and major waterways; therefore, they are receiving the attention of cleanup efforts. While the smaller two of the three airports have already been treated, Bien Hoa Airbase - with a contaminated area more than 5 times larger than both of the other airports combined - has not yet been treated. Furthermore, even if, or rather, when the Bien Hoa Airbase does get treated, the total area of treated soils in Vietnam will have amounted to less than 0.00003% of the total area that was sprayed. This made it clear to us that there is much work to do if the goal is to detoxify the environment as a whole.
Other topics we discussed included the viability of utilizing transgenic plants for bioremediation, current public health concerns, and the reliability of the collective research that has been done regarding both human health and environmental hazards in Vietnam as a result of TCDD. Dr. Bailey and Dr. Le Ke Son have proved instrumental in our understanding of the tragic history, current status, and hopeful future of Vietnam surrounding this issue.
Another type of expert we hoped to find was a Vietnamese researcher who had actually examined TCDD in situ; one that could help us understand how the Vietnamese government and society might view our solution.
Meet Dr. Mai Trinh, Director of the Institute of Agricultural Environment (IAE) and expert in Environmental Modelling and Climate Change. As a lead researcher, Dr. Trinh had worked on dioxin clean-up projects in Vietnam for nearly a decade and has hands-on experience with the chemicals. In an 40 minute interview via Skype, Dr. Trinh outlined the process it would take for us to receive Vietnamese approval and bring our solution to their soil (pun intended). Knowing the difficulty in treating a problem as widespread as TCDD contamination in Vietnam, Dr. Trinh informed us that it is certainly possible that they would accept a solution such as ours, given that it works. According to him, Vietnam would not have a problem using GMO plants to remediate the dioxins. The important thing would be to find a working solution. He was happy that soil incineration was treating the heaviest contaminations, protecting locals from further exposure. But he expressed a heartfelt desire to restore Vietnam's environment as a whole. We have had continuous contact with Dr. Trinh over the last few months and have learned a great deal from him.
Our interviews and consultations proved to be enrapturing experiences for our whole team, and a lot of fun. We soon felt that our experience could only get better if we were able to share it with others. During a meeting, one of our computer technicians suggested posting a live-stream of an interview online and inviting other iGEM teams to watch. While this mission turned out to be slightly more adventurous than it sounded, we kept our eyes on the prize and booked our third expert to interview, this time from the Weizmann Institute.
Dr. Jonathan Gressel is a Professor Emeritus at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as eight books. His Herbicide Resistance in Plants (1982) and Crop Ferality and Volunteerism (2005) are the first books ever written on those topics. Additionally, his works on plant genetics, weed science, crop protection and others have been awarded internationally. Because Prof. Gressel has worked extensively with transgenic plants, even co-founding a bio-tech company that involves GM algae, and because it seems to be such a confusing topic for the general public, we decided to interview him about GMO's, specifically in crops or as environmental solutions (such as ours). The interview was shot by camera and funneled into a livestream web-page that was open to the public. A handful of iGEM teams, and other guests we hadn't even invited, had logged on and joined us during the interview, asking questions along the way and receiving answers in real-time. The interview was a pleasant success, and the opportunity to share it with our fellow iGEMers was one of a kind!
Ethics
Aside from the ecological challenges that we address in our "Open Source" page, we also sought to address PR challenges involved in the ethics of GMO's.
In the following section, we complied our interviews with leaders and members of five different theological perspectives (including Atheism). Through our discussions with them, we are attempting to depict and contrast the different positions held by members of these factions with regards to the manipulation of biological systems - synthetic biology.
While the opinions of the persons we interviewed are not necessarily representative of the entire faction they belong to, we felt this was an interesting way to juxtapose different opinions on the subject, opinions that many of us may not have heard before.
Industry
Turning lab research into a product capable of reaching the market is no easy task. Before committing major efforts into an implementation strategy, we approached business executives and product managers within the Agro-tech industry in order to gain perspective on what it would take to bring a solution such as ours from the lab to the field.
In speaking with these business leaders - some of which have actually brought GMO's to market, and others with a deep understanding of Agro-tech product development - we came to understand that a solution such as ours has the potential to reach the market, but that, if it did, the product would not necessarily reach the regions of the world that need it the most. For this reason, our team dropped the idea of creating a business model, and instead adopted an open-source model so that our solution would not be restricted from any particular country or region.
Open source
Our open source platform includes all of the information necessary to replicate our synthetic pathway, transform it into plants and perform experiments using guidelines and tips from our own notebooks.
In addition, our open source features two plants that have been shown to have relevant Dioxin uptake mechanisms and are growable in a vast number of regions across the globe. General information on growth conditions and seasons as well as transformation and sterilization protocols are included as well.
The purpose of this is to make all of the relevant information readily available for all government, academic and public bodies to access in their attempts to tackle Dioxin pollution anywhere in the world.