Introduction

No project exists in isolation, and all actions we take will have an impact on the world around us. This is, in fact, desirable as our team, brash young souls that we are, hopes to change the world for the better through Coup Dy’état. However, it is wise to temper our exuberance by responsibly and thoughtfully evaluating whether our work will indeed be good for the world. To us, the Human Practices aspect of iGEM is a serious undertaking, and we attempted to critically examine our work from as many perspectives as possible. Each voice was given due consideration, and used to shape our project throughout our iGEM journey.

Policy Compliance

Respecting the rights and opinions of others is important, and we consider it a cornerstone of the spirit in which Integrated Human Practices should be conducted. Before carrying out any Human Practices activities, all our team members took an online course offered by our university on the Personal Data and Protection Act, a piece of legislation which establishes a general data protection regime for Singapore. This was so we could learn how to responsibly handle personal or privileged information shared by participants in our Human Practices activities. In addition, a number of our team members took a communication module, ES2331: Communicating Engineering, also offered by our university, which covered interview techniques as well as national and institutional guidelines for conducting this kind of social science research. Our activities were also vetted and sanctioned by our principal investigator, A/Prof Poh Chueh Loo.
After familiarizing ourselves with the relevant policies, we created a Human Practices Guide to ensure that our work would be reproducible, and always comply with national and institutional standards. This protocol comprises a workflow and four templates - interview request email, thank you email, statement of informed consent for face-to-face interviews, and statement of informed consent for email interviews. Our guide is available for perusal here.
Additionally, once we confirmed our project’s objective, we worked closely with the iGEM Safety Committee. Despite iGEM’s Do Not Release Policy, we believed that it was not just possible, but imperative that we bring our product out into the world, but we needed to consider biosafety and security. We thus developed a protocol for safe extraction, proposed it to the Safety Committee, and obtained their approval. After demonstrating our protocol’s effectiveness to the Committee, we invited potential users, such as local fashion designers, to give feedback on our dyes. Please visit our Safety Page for more details. There, you will also find our Safety Form, which shows how our team thoroughly assessed the risks and implications of our project.

Methodology

In the beginning, based on extensive literature review, we proposed several problems we were interested in solving, and brainstormed synthetic biology solutions. To investigate the viability of our ideas and demarcate the frontiers of current research, we interviewed experts in the relevant fields as the insights we required could not be obtained from literature alone.
After finalizing our problem statement and approach, we identified groups our project would affect, and Human Practices issues. Interviews were conducted at critical stages of our project as tests for our design iterations, following which we redesigned and rebuilt our prototypes.

Groups Identified

These groups are synthetic dye manufacturers, natural dye manufacturers, fashion designers, ordinary consumers, and people suffering because of synthetic dye pollution. The most straightforward way to find out how our project would affect these groups is to ask their representatives directly, and we have tried our best to do so. We considered using surveys to determine general sentiments, but after further thought, found this endeavour impossible. Our methods and rationales are explained below.

Synthetic Dye Manufacturers

We conducted interviews with high-ranking Singapore-based representatives of major synthetic dye companies.

Natural Dye Manufacturers

Unfortunately, natural dye manufacturers are not based in Singapore, and our attempts to contact them were unsuccessful. We thus interviewed experts in biomanufacturing instead, to determine how disruptive our technology could be in contrast to conventional manufacturing methods.

Fashion Designers

Local fashion designers who used natural dyes were also interviewed. Because there are too few of them, surveys would not be statistically significant. Moreover, having conversations instead would allow us to explore the issue more deeply. Views of international fashion designers were gleaned from secondary sources.

Ordinary Consumers

Singapore does not have a textile and dyeing industry. The problem we wanted to solve is far removed from the ordinary consumer here, and so surveying them would yield little useful information. We interviewed a “super consumer” instead, and sought her advice on how to make ordinary consumers aware of systemic problems in fashion. We also initiated public engagement efforts via social media.

People Suffering from Synthetic Dye Pollution

As implied earlier, such people are not available in Singapore, and are difficult to meaningfully contact. To substitute, we drew on secondary sources such as newspapers, paying special attention to direct quotes from the people affected.

Human Practices Issues Identified

Our project required the additional investigation of these Human Practices issues: environmental impact, philosophy/ethics, public engagement/dialogue, product design, public policy/legislation. Safety, security, and risk assessment are addressed on our Safety page.

Environmental Impact

See our Design page for more on how we compared our environmental impact against other dye manufacturing methods.

Philosophy/Ethics

We considered three basic types of first-order ethical theories as frameworks to reason if our project is moral, i.e., if it would have an overall positive impact on the world - duty-based theories, consequentialist theories, and virtue-based theories. Duty-based theories are not useful because it does not have sufficient explanatory power to help us resolve what we see as the main quandary - the choice between the duty to reduce harm caused by pollution, and the duty to ensure others’ livelihoods in the face of disruptive technologies. Virtue theory was discarded as its focus is too personal for our purpose. It seems fundamentally misguided to evaluate how our project affects others by emphasizing our own character. In contrast, although consequentialist theories have their flaws, it is clear that the main thrust of Human Practices is to weigh our actions against alternatives, and intuitively this is the most appropriate type of theory in the context of iGEM.
However, the “utility calculus” was challenging to implement for this complex issue. We estimated, to the best of our abilities, that if our product is scaled up to industrial levels and widely adopted, we would improve more lives by eliminating the pollution caused by synthetic dyes, than harm by threatening others’ employment in dye manufacturing companies. At the very least, our project at this stage, being a prototype of a novel biomanufacturing process, is of some scientific value, and therefore has a positive impact on the world. We thus decided to go ahead with our project.
Additional ethical considerations have been evaluated in our Safety Form.

Public Engagement/Dialogue

Ordinary consumers are not directly affected by synthetic dye pollution. In fact, students in Singapore, i.e. future consumers or perhaps even already prolific consumers, are mostly ignorant about synthetic biology and its potential as a tool to solve such problems. To raise awareness, not merely about the focus of our project but also of synthetic biology itself, we strategically targeted post-secondary students in our outreach events and facilitated meaningful dialogues on both topics. Read more on our Education and Engagement page.

Product Design

See our Results section below for our discussions with experts on how to improve our product design.

Public Policy/Legislation

Biomanufacturing and biomanufacturing research is generously supported in Singapore, as shown by the establishment of the Biotransfomation Innovation Platform at A*STAR, a statutory board supporting research aligned to areas of competitive advantage and national needs for Singapore. Thankfully, this was not a hurdle for us.

Results

Write-ups for each interview summarizing the stakeholder/Human Practice issue involved, what we learned, and how our project was subsequently informed by this feedback are presented below. These write-ups have been approved by their subjects prior to their upload on our wiki.
While we cannot release full interview transcripts or recordings, the questions we asked our interviewees are available for downloading as .pdf files at the end of each write-up. This is to make our process more transparent. We hope that the reasons why we asked each interviewee the questions we did will be self-evident. We also believe that the depth and breadth of the questions we asked will show how our team attempted to creatively, meticulously, and exhaustively understand the problem, our solution, and our impact.
Click on each photo in the gallery to enjoy its corresponding write-up.

Part I - Finding a Problem

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