Team:NCHU Taichung/Human Practices/Introduction
During Vietnam War, herbicide that contains agent orange, or dioxin, was spread over in Vietnam for American army to have a clear sight about all the Vietnamese hiding in the forest. However, due to the toxicity of dioxin, lot of victims surviving after the war had serious gene mutation on their offspring.
In order to get to know how this highly toxicity compound, dioxin, could affect human’s live, we went to Vietnam in person. This is where we get the idea of doing our project, using microorganism and further applied by technique of phytoremediation to break down dioxin. We believe that our project not only can provide factories producing dioxin a new way to break down dioxin, but also can bring a better future to human beings.
Human Practice
We’re not only doing our project, but it is our enjoyment bringing knowledge of synthetic biology and iGEM to the society, that is, “go beyond the lab”. By reaching out to the public, we get to have talk and discussion about what we can bring to the society and at the same time get feedback to make our project meets the needs of the public.
In order to improve our project on experiment part, we visited several government agencies, private enterprise, and experts related to our project. By discussing with them, we are able to apply the knowledge with greater points of view.
Concluded from the visits, we found that heat method, burning down dioxin with high temperature, is the major application in industries while microorganism method is rarely used. This is due to the uncertainty and technique limitation of applying this method. More research needs to be done before the method can be widely utilized. However, once it is being used, numerous advantages is sure to be obtained. Since both the agencies mentioned above are eagerly looking forward to our result, it is our later work to collaborate with agencies and bring our result out the lab to engineered-applied field.
It is always great to have communication with other teams all over the world. By sharing ideas, discussing with each other, better approach often came up. Particularly, it is our pleasure to hold 2018 Asia-Pacific Conference and get to meet other teams in Taiwan, China, and Japan.
In order to get to know how this highly toxicity compound, dioxin, could affect human’s live, we went to Vietnam in person. This is where we get the idea of doing our project, using microorganism and further applied by technique of phytoremediation to break down dioxin.
Since break down of dioxin is closely related to the environment, we hope that our project can bring something good to our living planet. After visiting some agencies, we got affirmation from them on the application of our project is surely going to have impact on environment.