Team:Waterloo/Human Practices
Human Practices
Human Practices
This year, our Human Practices work included a combination of new project ideas, as well as carefully refined projects from previous seasons. We had a strong focus on consulting experts and our work is grouped into four major categories: Societal Considerations, Communication and Public Bias, Public Engagement, and Safety.
Societal Considerations
To better understand the societal impact of our project, it was important for us to explore our project in different contexts and gather opinions from our community. We began with interviews from several professors at the University of Waterloo and industry representatives, who provided us with insightful ideas about the real-world challenges and applications of our project. By combining their responses with our own imagination and research, we developed a project analysis and proposed a series of diverse potential applications of our system. Finally, we took a look at the barriers that would prevent a potential scale-up of our project and proposed a solution to overcome those barriers. Please read more on our Societal Considerations page!
Communication and Public Bias
The Implicit Association Test, or IAT, is a psychological tool for uncovering unconscious, or implicit, biases toward or against a category, like biotechnology. For us at Waterloo iGEM, this can be a tool for learning how the people we reach the most, through social media and events, as well as our greater community, feel about synthetic biology-associated words. As this is our second time using the test, we’ve changed some things after what we learned last year! Please continue to our Communication page to learn more about our revamping, our results, and to try the IAT (insert new link) for yourself!
Public Engagement and Education
As always, our team dedicates a large portion of our season to interacting with students and the community regarding both our annual project as well as providing tools and resources to better understand the field of science (with a focus on synthetic biology, of course!). Between synbio workshops for high school students, literacy workshops for university students, and presenting to professors and industry leaders at a conference, we are proud to have become a team that external groups reach out to to inspire new and upcoming scientists. To read all about our engagement and education work this year, visit our ![Public Engagement and Education] (https://2018.igem.org/Team:Waterloo/Engagement) page!
(insert safety icon)
Safety
Waterloo iGEM has ensured that all safety measures have been followed and improved upon from previous years. From multiple training modules being completed by each lab member to the implementation of full chemical inventory and eyewash maintenance systems, the lab was able to be productive and organized while maintaining a high level of safety. The project was designed with safety in mind as well, in order to reduce risks. To read about the full work done regarding safety for the Waterloo iGEM team, please visit the Safety page!
Integrated Human Practices
As a team competing in the New Application track, it is often difficult to design a project that caters to stakeholders in one specific area or sector. For this reason, our team felt that it would be more impactful to design a co-culture system that provides a foundation that people in all areas can easily build upon. This goal helped drive our work with Integrated Human Practices, and resulted in the design of a multi-purpose tool that gives industries and researchers alike an opportunity to expand on our work into their own spaces.
From our consultations with professors and experts (read about them here), we gathered different perspectives and ideas which we integrated into the creation of our design milestones. These are documented below.
| Design Milestones | Why do we want to achieve this? |
|---|---|
| E.coli/E.coli | The simplest organism for us to engineer and used as a proof of concept. |
| E.Coli/S.cerevisiae | Using different organisms opens up the door to more effective bioprocessing, as one may be more suitable for certain pathways than the other. |
| Mammalian/Mammalian | Demonstrating that we can create and maintain specific ratios between mammalian cells has lots of potential for research in tissue engineering and synthetic meat. |
| Mammalian/Fungal | Currently, fungal infections are very difficult to study in vitro, so the use of optogenetics to slow the growth of the fungi would improve the abilities of researchers to understand the reaction of fungi. |
(insert IAT IHP write up here)