Integrated Human Practices

This year, Team UAlberta’s primary objective was to serve our local Albertan community and design a project with tangible, positive impacts. With this focus in mind, our team found out about the impending threat of Nosema ceranae which is directly related to our provincial apiculture industry and affects our local beekeepers.

https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2018/9/9f/T--UAlberta--HoveApiaryCandid.png Figure 1: Members of Team UAlberta learning about the basics of keeping during one of our visits to a local beekeeper.

UAlberta’s project was fundamentally influenced by the beekeeping community. Initially, we aimed to address the effects of neonicotinoids on honeybees, but after multi-level consultation with beekeepers, we refocussed to combating the honeybee parasite Nosema ceranae instead. Beekeepers alerted us that Nosema was the larger threat to honeybees in Alberta as the only approved treatment against Nosema, called fumagillin, was discontinued. Therefore, we aimed to produce porphyrins for bee therapeutics to address the need for a fumagillin alternative that beekeepers themselves expressed. We also consulted the past producer of fumagillin, government researchers, the Calgary Beekeeping Association, and the Alberta Beekeepers Commission. These organizations expressed excitement that we are addressing a major issue of theirs. Subsequent interviews also influenced our design considerations. To deliver a solution compatible with beekeeper’s established processes, we designed for two routes of implementation: an inducible honeybee porphyrin-producing probiotic, or large scale porphyrin production for conventional application methods.

We also decided to make our project community-centred because we understand that while scientific advancements are important, no science should be done within a vacuum. It was important to us to take into consideration the community we were going to affect. For us, our community is Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and by extension the world.We particularly chose to focus on Alberta because of the prevalence of beekeeping in Alberta. eam UAlberta maintains that we also understand that our community is the iGEM community.

We showed our commitment and our desire to better both of these communities through our two main Human Practices projects. Our first project was the production of our documentary and our second project was a survey which examines iGEMs age, gender, race, and sexual orientation, and the suggestions for ways that iGEM teams can improve their inclusivity.

The Documentary

Screenshots of Interviews

The original objective for our documentary was two fold. First we wanted to speak with stakeholders to develop our project, so that it was centered on what the community needed. Second we wanted to shine a light on beekeepers and how important they are to Alberta.

The filming of a documentary allowed us to speak with stakeholders on a very personal level so that we could learn about their work, families, communities and their lives in general. These interviews were important to us as we wanted to make APIS as usable as possible, as an easy to use product is more likely to both be used, and used effectively. We also wanted to be able to share our ideas with the people this could affect the most. We thus included experts to get their feedback on our project so that we could come to truly understand the issue and the best way to address it.

We also wanted to do something that would help the beekeeping community regardless of our scientific advancements. We wanted to be able to give back to them, and we thought that a documentary would be the best way to do this. Alberta beekeepers produce 41% of Canada's honey; they are an important part of our farming industry, and just in general are amazing individuals [1]. However, few Albertans, let alone Canadians, know how important they are. With the production and display of this documentary, it is our hope that more people can learn about this community and the challenges that they are facing. We also noticed that a lot of people (ourselves included at the start of this project) said “I love bees” but rarely knew anything about them or the community that keeps them. This documentary helps to address that issue.

With thorough consultations with local beekeepers, the economic and ecological importance of the apiculture industry in Alberta was revealed to the team. However, from our members’ prior experiences, the prevalence of beekeeping in Alberta was not commonly known. To address the underrepresentation of Alberta’s apiculture industry, we decided to produce a short documentary that features the contributions of Alberta beekeepers. With their consent, we filmed our interviews with them which our team hopes will highlight the issues that their community faces. The motivation behind this documentary, which does not focus on communicating concepts of synthetic biology, but solely on the beekeepers, is to promote the foundational motivation for our project: stakeholders first. This idea is often undervalued as the technical considerations of projects sometimes precede consultation with relevant communities. With our documentary, we hope to normalize our method of fully understanding stakeholders needs first before beginning design.

Inclusivity Survey

(Link to page)

iGEM is an organization that is driven by young people's idealism. Because of this, iGEM provides the perfect atmosphere to drive progress within STEM both scientifically and socially. Creating an inclusive space starts by being aware of the downfalls of the organization, and from there moving to address any issues that prevent the organization from achieving true diversity and inclusivity. The UAlberta iGEM team was interested in investigating the age, sex, gender, and race demographics of North American teams, to examine if there are any inclusion disparities in North American iGEM teams.

While we knew to display our demographics was important, we were also cognizant of the fact that statistics and data analytics are useless without application, so we decided to make some applicable recommendations. We have also made five recommendations that can help when improving a team inclusivity. These recommendations are based off papers, research, and communities focused on improving inclusivity.

Finally, we recognize that this survey is imperfect and welcome constructive criticism that we could use to improve it. However, we did go through a lengthy process of vetting this survey to ensure that it was a well written as possible. We did this by consulting with iGEM HQ’s diversity committee, and working on the survey with Dr. Margaret-Ann Armour the U of A’s Associate Dean of Science for Diversity.

We hope that teams can use these recommendations to improve their teams' inclusivity and open up the conversation on their teams about inclusivity. All teams should make an active effort to make iGEM a safe space and that starts with each individual and their team!

References

[1] Horticulture and Cross Sectoral Division Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, "Statistical Overview of the Canadian Honey and Bee Industry and the Economic Contribution of Honey Bee Pollination 2013-2014," Government of Canada, 2016. [Online} Available: http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/industry-markets-and-trade/canadian-agri-food-sector-intelligence/horticulture/horticulture-sector-reports/statistical-overview-of-the-canadian-honey-and-bee-industry-and-the-economic-contribution-of-honey-bee-pollination-2016/?id=1510864970935