Team:DTU-Denmark/Collaborations
The question of why we want to travel to Mars
For the Human Practises part of the project, we decided quite early on to do a collaboration with the University of Copenhagen and their iGEM team. Our universities are already tightly bound together and seeing as we both did space related projects and were familiar with each other and our respective projects due to having met at the BioBrick Tutorial and later at the Nordic iGEM Conference, it made perfect sense to have our teams meet with the aim to elevate the ambitions of our respective human practises projects by joining forces. We agreed that it would be fun to explore a new side of our natural science-brains and write a report based on humanistic fields. We found that this was quite unusual in previous iGEM space projects and therefore found it relevant to question issues related to space travel in a new way. The University of Exeter had reached out to do a space-related human practises project and together, we decided to do a three-part space-related humanistic report each university exploring the same overall issue on the basis of different fields. DTU engaged in history, UCPH rhetoric, and Exeter ethics.
The Copenhagen High School Symbiotes Project
It was our PhD. supervisor Kyle who got the idea to expand the iGEM participation in Denmark and include a high school team of students in the age of 16-19. There have been a growing interest in the High school track around the world (see Fig 1) and Philip, from the last DTU team, Tenna and Jacob therefore set out to establish a high school team in the greater Copenhagen area to compete in iGEM; and so, the project ‘Copenhagen High School Symbiotes’, CHSS for short, was born.
Fig. 1: - High school teams competing in iGEM(1)
As it would be the very first high school team from Denmark to enter iGEM, a lot of regulations and rules had to be checked with the proper authorities to make sure it was feasible. With the green-light given, CHSS started to take shape.
Firstly, by the suggestion of Philip, they got in contact with the non-profit organization Biotech Academy, located at DTU, to plan a collaboration with them as they would with more expertise facilitate the project. The project could be modeled after the Biosensor project, which is another collaboration between Biotech Academy and DTU Biobuilders.
As past and present participants of the DTU iGEM team, they could contribute with structure of the process, planning, gathering information necessary and having the needed information regarding the competition to sell it to the teachers of the different high schools. Biotech Academy, on the other hand, offered experience with teaching biotech, engaging the students and what was necessary to be allowed to work in the lab with high schoolers.
With the forward movement of the project, they realised many more benefits of the CHSS team becoming a reality. Not only would it spark an interest in synthetic biology in high schools, which had been close to zero before, but it would also make a great chance for a collaboration with future teams from DTU and hopefully inspire more teams from Denmark.
The next step was getting the faculty to confirm the project as well as the necessary budget. They all spent weeks researching, corresponding through emails and having meetings with Biotech Academy and the DTU faculty to make the plans reasonable and feasible.
However, to make sure the project stood solid when going to the faculty to get approved, and also for when sending out funding applications, they knew they needed to have the high schools behind them supporting the CHSS project.
The participants would come from different high schools and conduct their research at DTU. The high schools were chosen based on location compared to DTU, the general level of education and competitiveness, as well as the level of science taught.
It didn’t take very long until a total of 7 high schools had shown interest and so funding began. To get a strong head-start, they decided to apply for a three-year period. Many hours were spent in perfecting their applications since they knew it was a lot of money they asked for.
As they neared the Giant Jamboree they had gotten several recommendations written for their fond application and it was sent out. The entire team is waiting anxiously for the answer in January as everyone sees the great potential in a high school team.
