Meet up

Parisian Meetup

The Pasteur iGEM team hosted the Parisian iGEM Meetup in Paris (France) Saturday the 7th of July. In the morning, each iGEM team presented their project in front of a jury composed of various professionals. Then at the end of the afternoon, we had open discussions on bioethics and round tables.

The Jury (Pascale Dupuis-Williams, Jonathan Keller and Deshmukh Gopaul gave us feedbacks about our project and presentation. This meetup allowed us to train before the real presentation at Boston.

Munich Meetup

The Munich iGEM team hosted the European iGEM Meetup in Munich (Germany) from Friday the 20th to Sunday the 22nd of July. At this event, many iGEM teams from all over the continent came together to exchange and discuss ideas with each other, as well as listen to talks from experts in the field of synthetic biology. In total, 180 persons were participating.

In this Meetup, we had a chance to talk to Will Wright which is Business Accelerator, Investment Manager and European iGEM Ambassador. We also had a chance to see and talk to Randy Rettberg, President and Founder of the iGEM Foundation. We presented our project to him and we discussed about the difficulties to obtain some Visa to go to the Giant Jamboree which is rather unfair. He has shown a huge interest in our project and was also very concerned about the political situation that prevent students to attend the competition in Boston, USA. He told us that potentially in a few years from now, the iGEM HQ will try to move the Giant Jamboree to another country, such as Canada or somewhere in Europe.

On Saturday, leading international scientists from the field of Synthetic Biology gave talks about the most relevant topics of synbio; Michael Hecht (Princeton University) and Kathrin Lang (Technische Universität München). In the afternoon, we had a poster session, where all iGEM teams presented their project and we had an opportunity to share our ideas with other teams. We almost managed to discuss to all European teams and talked to the American iGEM team from University of Delaware. Also, in the afternoon we participated in workshops on topics “in and outside of Synthetic Biology and Science” such as team building and fundraising.

In summary, general opinions of people about our project were very good and we saw curiosity about our idea and its potential fallout. People were really interested in our project and many considered it to be very innovative. Thus, the innovative aspect and the ideas are clearly a strength of our project compared to the other teams. But besides all that, there are still a lot of questions left unanswered about photobioreactor and ecological concerns about our project. The poster was really appreciated! Although some modifications and corrections would be important to be made such as the introduction part, the name of the team members, errors in spelling and HP part.