Template:Groningen/Human Practices

The key role of Integrated Human Practices in our project

Because our project was focused on tackling a problem extremely relevant to our society, it was essential that we looked at the impact our project would have and how we could adapt our design according to the acquired information from stakeholder dialogues. Only then would our project have the desired value to be able to contribute to the issue of antibiotic resistance. Developing a detection method in the lab is one challenge, but developing a detection method that could be used in the real world is another, more complex, challenge. The complexity of the challenge in the antibiotic field made it hard to find the niche in which we could apply and validate our detection method. By meeting with experts and stakeholders, we were able to shape our design to fit everyone's wishes as best possible, and make our design relevant and responsible. The timeline of our integrated human practices process is illustrated to give an impression on how our project evolved over time due to interviews with stakeholders, and those we collaborated with.

For example, we collaborated with farmer Paul Oosthoek and did experiments on his cow’s milk samples. Additionally, we performed experiments with the isolates gained from the experts Dik Mevius and Fimme van der Wal. Also, veterinarians gave us insights in their documents to gain more knowledge about the treatment procedures. Futhermore, multiple stakeholders participated in our project How can iGEM teams best include Relevance and Responsibility in their Design?

In the last section, we summarise the most crucial insights and how stakeholders interactions lead to impressive changes in our experiments and design.

Project Timeline

In this timeline, we take you on a journey through the evolution of our design. In this tree-like interactive element on this page, you can hover over different icons, that depict important developments in the project. Each icon will fold-out to show the insights and changes we gained together with further relevant information about people/institutions involved. Additionally, our timeline is featured in the second video of our video project!

• Our interactive timeline

  Click on the icons in the timeline, and find out about all the insights we gained from our stakeholders and how the dialogues shaped our project.

  

  Antibiotic resistance shield

  The overuse of antibiotics has led to the development of antibiotic resistances. Although this problem has already been popping up in scientific and newspaper articles for over 30 years, its threat is one that can no longer be ignored. The US Department of Health and Human Services estimates that annually over 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the United States are caused by antibiotic resistance. Moreover, it is approximated that by 2050, 10 million people will die annually due to antibiotic resistance. The ‘antibiotic apocalypse’ needs to be prevented, so action should be taken now!