Team:Calgary/Human Practices
From 2009.igem.org
THE OUTREACH, FUNDRAISING, AND ETHICS PROJECTS
HUMAN PRACTICES: An Overview In order to form a synthetic biology community, it is very important to involve certain segments that would play a significant role in community formation. These segments include the large corporate Sector (interest lies in funding and thus more research and innovations) and the Education Sector (involvement encourages more research and development in the field). Both segments would play a critical role in sustaining the future of synthetic biology. However, attracting interest from these two segments of our community is not an easy task. Majority of the population in these segments probably have never heard of the new field of synthetic biology. Furthermore, there has not been much done about the ethical issues surrounding synthetic biology, which could raise questions concerning the potential harms and benefits of the field. These concerns are some of the communication barriers that stand between the corporate and education sectors, and the field of synthetic biology. Although, the complete removal of these barriers is impossible, their impact of these communication barriers could be significantly reduced. This reduction in the impact could lead to greater involvement of the education corporate sectors in the field of synthetic biology. Keeping these considerations in mind, our University of Calgary iGEM team tailored its approach towards the human practices aspect of our project in a way that would try to reduce the impact of these communication barriers and therefore would lead to greater involvement of the education and corporate sectors in the field of synthetic biology. And as mentioned above, these segments would play a pivotal role in the formation of a synthetic biology community. In order to increase the impact of our human practices approach, we divided our human practices team into three areas namely ethics, marketing and, education and outreach. Each area would have its own individual focus but in the end, their goal would be the same and that is to work towards the formation of a synthetic biology community. Our University of Calgary iGEM team strongly believes that it is very important for these three areas to interact with each other because all areas are related to each in some way or the other. Since the formation of a synthetic biology community was our University of Calgary iGEM team’s long term goal, we assigned each area specific short term goals and milestones that would be accomplished before the iGEM Jamboree. The following is a brief summary of the goals of the three areas of our Human Practices aspect of our project: ETHICS The University of Calgary iGEM ethics team focused on two major components this year: 1) Written Paper 2) Ethics Conference The written paper examined the varying issues that surround the emerging field of synthetic biology. The main areas that we focused on are environmental, encomic ethical, legal and social issues that arise in synthetic biology. Some of these issues include:
Marketing The goals of our marketing team included attracting the corporate sector’s interest in synthetic biology, iGEM and our project, and raising sustainable amount of funds for our University of Calgary iGEM team. We commenced our marketing campaign by writing up a business plan that highlighted our project description for 2009 and our goals and milestones that we hope to achieve. We also organized a sponsorship package that highlighted the past achievements and accomplishments of our previous University of Calgary iGEM teams and also gave a description of our 2009 University of Calgary iGEM project. Our University of Calgary iGEM team was able to raise more than $100,000 dollars for our project this year. Our sponsors range from several departments from the University of Calgary to research and development, and oil and gas companies. |