Overview

An inspirational project that could change the world is not only limited to laboratories, but further interacts with the society. The starting point of this process is reading the current social and environmental context. The next step is searching for applicable aspects in the reality and reaching for it. This year, we have achieved this goal through the three major scopes; human practice, integrated human practice and public engagement activities. The links are provided below.

Human Practice

Our team considered biosafety, product design for implementation to other fields of studies, and education as the key goals of our human practice activities. To simply summarize our project, the modeling simulator we produced could easily calculate the survival rate of different behaviors of microorganism at equilibrium and analyze the survival pattern of the cooperator and the cheater group. By implementing the simulation models we constructed, we could reach the real-world systems and have a positive impact on the society. The applicable scopes of researches that we considered to be beneficial to the society were human disease mechanism & therapeutics researches and the food biosafety assessment process.

While searching for the governmental institutions that fit the chosen criteria, we contacted the Korean Centers for Disease control & prevention (KCDC). We conducted an interview with the division leader and deputy director of bacterial research division on the application possibility.

Moreover, we communicated with the Korea Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS). From the contact, we were able to apprehend the safety standards and specifically applicable fields of our project in the food source assessments. We also gained information on biosafety tests of GMMs and the possibility of our modeling used in the application area. Finally, we visited the Gwacheon National Science Museum and arranged a meeting with the head director. We suggested our project simulator as an educational exhibition material and investigated the biosafety problems that could happen by displaying living microorganisms.

Integrated Human Practice

While working on our modeling and simulator, we focused on how we could expand our modeling and add possible parameters such as behavior patterns to the situation. Therefore we had a deep discussion with professor Kang to seek advice for developing our modeling simulator and how we could expand our project to different fields of academic research such as Datamining. We also investigated the problem of having a small number of data set in modeling and validation methods that could solve this problem.

Public Engagement activities

One of the biggest concerns of a synthetic biologist is to engage more people in the field of synthetic biology and bringing out the science to the social area regarding regulations. This year, we focused on analyzing the current stasis of synthetic biology in Republic of Korea and the recognition in the public. Therefore, we engaged in a discussion with one of the few synthetic biologists in Korea and opened an education session in Yeouido High school in Seoul. Moreover, our team set up an open seminar for all undergraduates to help them understand synthetic biology and to achieve general recognition of synthetic biology as a new academic field. Lastly, we managed to meet with the vice minister of the Korea National Institute for Bioethics Policy. Due to the meeting, our team analyzed the current national legislation of Korea and ethical considerations related to genetic engineering and genetically modulated microorganism (GMM).