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Revision as of 19:17, 17 October 2018

CONNECT WITH US

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.


Human Practices

This section charts how we identified and investigated one or more Human Practices issues in the context of our project, thus fulfilling iGEM's requirements for Human Practices.


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

At the beginning, based on our 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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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 the 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.


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.


See our Integrated Human Practices section below for our discussions with experts on how to improve our product design.

Biomanufacturing and biomanufacturing research is generously supported in Singapore, as shown by the establishment of the Biotransformation Innovation Platform at A*STAR, a statutory board supporting research aligned to areas of competitive advantage and national needs for Singapore. We have also been supported by NUS Synthetic Biology for Clinical and Technological Innovation, a highly interdisciplinary research program for synthetic biology. Thankfully, public policy and legislation was not a hurdle we had to clear.




Integrated Human Practices

This section shows how our investigation of Human Practices issues in the previous section has been integrated into the purpose, design, and execution of our project, thus fulfilling iGEM's requirements for Integrated Human Practices.


Results

Our project's purpose was influenced by experts in various fields, including industry experts, researchers at universities and research institutes (e.g. A*STAR), the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and also medical staff at the National University Hospital. Talking to people as knowledgeable as Dr. Foo Jee Loon, for example, helped us eliminate three other problems we were considering to focus on fashion, namely, tropical diseases, wound healing, and diagnosing multi-drug resistant organisms.

Our project's design changed after we used expert interviews to forecast our potential impact. At first, we wanted to produce many colours of dyes in a single cell - orange, pink, and brown. However, after conversations with major synthetic dye manufacturers and fashion designers, we understood the market better. Based on the advice of experts such as Mr. Holger Schlaefke and Miss Leong Minyi, we decided to focus on synthesizing luteolin, a yellow dye.

Our hardware also went through several design iterations based on user feedback. For example, our characterization tool, PDF-LA! developed a functional symmetry following discussions with Dr. Teh Ai Ying, a research fellow in NUS. Please visit our page on PDF-LA! to find out more!

For our project's execution, we consulted experts on biomanufacturing like Dr. Nic Lindley and Dr. Yvonne Chow to find out how to optimize our production through bioreactor design. They helped to validate our project's design choices, such as the choice to utilize xylose in our feedstock and the use of optogenetics instead of chemical inducers. We used their suggestions to consider a futuristic bioreactor design.

To help our project engage a wider audience, we sought out a fashion studies scholar, Miss Angelene Wong, to identify which parts of our project would appeal to others, and understand how we could better communicate to the ordinary consumer. Her insights have informed how we chose to present our project on social media and this wiki.

For more details, do consider spending time browsing through our expert interviews writeups!

Bringing our dye to a natural dye designer


Coup Dy’etat is a project that is committed to integrating user feedback into every aspect of our project, from project direction to execution. One artist in particular, Miss Leong Minyi, was with us at the beginning of our project. Her feedback was instrumental to our decision to produce yellow dye. Now, after having successfully produced luteolin, amongst other achievements (see our demonstrate page), we returned to seek her comments on our last ever batch of luteolin, thus finally completing a full revolution of the design-build-test-learn cycle of engineering.


Learning points


Our conversation with her was, as usual, fruitful as we learnt much about dyes that we had not previously considered. We gained insights as to why our naturally-produced dye did not behave as expected - she raised the possibility that the fabric we dyed was turning brown due to the possibility of tannins being present, or it could also have been due to oxidation of the dye upon exposure to air. Another interesting point she raised was regarding the application of mordants to the textiles to facilitate the binding of the natural dye to the fabric - the most common mordants are aluminium, which brings out the vibrancy of the yellow colour, and iron, which tones down certain colours. As mordants are currently necessary for the successful dyeing of textiles using natural dyes, the holy grail would still be creating a natural dye that does not require mordanting, a problem synthetic dyes evade.


We also asked her to share her method of extracting dyes so that we could compare it against our own methods. Our team tried DMSO and methanol separately, and it was interesting to find out that she simply used water as a solvent, but performed repeated rounds of extraction by heat. It is important to note here that Ms Leong Minyi specialises in extracting dyes from natural sources, especially from leaves and roots, whereas our project focuses on bacteria-produced dyes, which could account for the differences in methods of extraction.


Lastly, she advised us once again that we should keep the consumers’ needs for light-fastness, colour-fastness etc in mind, and ultimately aim to have our dye’s properties evaluated through professional testing. Also, when the time comes to market our dye, we should consider that consumers may still not have come to terms with biomanufacturing as a concept. Thus, although we may be excited to share synthetic biology with the world, the world may not be ready for us.



How we integrated her comments into our project


It was extremely heartening to have been able to meet a major source of inspiration for our project before we left for the Giant Jamboree. Due to time constraints, we were unfortunately unable to incorporate her comments into the design of our project. However, her insights have set the stage for the next iteration of a design-test-build-learn cycle. We were able to use the production of natural dyes as a case study to learn how to better optimise our bio-manufacturing platform, as the principles discussed were broad.


From working on the way bacterial dyes are perceived, to producing “super” natural dyes that do not require mordants - the possibilities for our project are plentiful. With the support of inspirational creatives such as Ms Leong, the world of natural dye making is our oyster!








Expert Interviews

Write-ups for each interview summarizing the stakeholder/Human Practice issue involved, what we learned, and how we subsequently acted on 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 download 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. We have over 10 interviews!