Team:MichiganState/Human Practices
Human Practices Overview
Our project encompassed three areas within human practices: research, impact, and outreach. Each allowed us to better understand our project as well as help the community become a part of our experiments. We met with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Michigan Department of Agriculture (MDA), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), lawyers, conventional farmers, professors, environmental scientists, global agriculture specialists, bioethicists, organic farmers, biotechnology companies, and entrepreneurs to change our project based on regulations and professional opinions. We then gathered the thoughts, opinions, and concerns of community members, raised awareness of GMO foods, and invited the community to engage in conversation on a hot topic.
Engaging Experts: GMOs, food, water, drought, and salinity affect much of humanity. Such a far-reaching project required discussions with professionals, ethicists, farmers, and more. Click here to check out our site visit and click here to read interviews from professionals who assisted our endeavors.
Responsibility: Developing our science requires responsibility, listening to the farmers, and hearing public concerns. We spoke with hundreds of community members through surveys, discovering their fears and investigating mitigation of public disapproval of GMOs. Click here to learn more about our surveys.
Public Engagement: iGEM values and goals led us to reaching out, holding public meetings, and creating a video explaining our project and its importance. Click here to learn more about our public engagement.
Education: The next generation of scientists must be interested. We held science days at museums and libraries, allowing children to learn more about our project, plants, and synthetic biology. Click here to learn more about how we educated the community.
Collaborations: We collaborated with many teams throughout the course of the project, creating exchanges of information, ideas, and time. We participated in meetups, provided ideas for Human Practices, and even had troubleshooting sessions. Click here to learn more about our collaborations.