Team:Calgary/Human Practices

Updates
Outreach
Ethics

We have reached the seventh and final stop of our tour of the iGEM Calgary wiki. Human practices this year took on the challenge of interacting with all different levels and groups of the local Calgary community. Through fundraising we were able to target the local corporate network. Ethics introduced a novel approach to examining ethical implications of Synthetic Biology. Meanwhile marketing raised the visibility of iGEM as a premiere education program through our media coverage. Additionally our educational outreach activities were instrumental in promoting synthetic biology to the next generation of potential researchers!

Thanks for coming along with us through this tour and we welcome you to check out other fascinating, content-rich pages such as our Synthetic BLOGology page with a sampling of our team's latest blog posts or our sponsors page to check out our community supporters!

Our ethics team is focusing on two major compnents this year. First we are writing a paper examining the environmental, economic, ethical, legal and social implications of our project as well as how to look at synthetic biology ethics in general. We are also working on hosting an ethics conference using the virtual world of second life. We will be organizing general topics, guiding questions as well as inviting guest speakers to take part in this event. We hope that this will be a creative format to explore ethics that will allow for discussion between multiple people.

Our outreach team is in charge of getting our message out to the public. We aim to raise the profile of synthetic biology in Alberta by exposing more people to both the iGEM competition and synthetic biology in general. We hope that this will generate interest and help to promote the field of synthetic biology. To do this, we have planned several activities targeting high school students as well as the general public. We are inviting select high school students to our lab to learn about what we're doing. We are also preparing a presentation to take to high schools in the fall that teaches students about iGEM and Synthetic Biology in general. We are also starting a collaborative project with UChicago with the aim of creating an Outreach kit for use by future iGEM teams in the competition.