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Team:KU Leuven/Human Practices/HannahArendt
From 2013.igem.org
Secret garden
Congratulations! You've found our secret garden! Follow the instructions below and win a great prize at the World jamboree!
- A video shows that two of our team members are having great fun at our favourite company. Do you know the name of the second member that appears in the video?
- For one of our models we had to do very extensive computations. To prevent our own computers from overheating and to keep the temperature in our iGEM room at a normal level, we used a supercomputer. Which centre maintains this supercomputer? (Dutch abbreviation)
- We organised a symposium with a debate, some seminars and 2 iGEM project presentations. An iGEM team came all the way from the Netherlands to present their project. What is the name of their city?
Now put all of these in this URL:https://2013.igem.org/Team:KU_Leuven/(firstname)(abbreviation)(city), (loose the brackets and put everything in lowercase) and follow the very last instruction to get your special jamboree prize!
The Public Judgment and Common Sense in relation to Synthetic Biology
The iGEM-team from Heidelberg in 2008, concluded that "[o]nly a well-informed public is able to develop a non-prejudiced and profound opinion about synthetic biology” (iGEM team Heidelberg, 2008). They argued that it was necessary to inform the public about the uses, potentials and practices of synthetic biology and therewith enabling the public to have an informed opinion on the developments in synthetic biology. The students from Heidelberg are not the only ones that feel the need to close to gap between the public and the scientist concerning developments related to genetic manipulation and the synthetization of DNA. In much of the recent literature it is argued that in order to bypass the hostility of the general public towards new developments in genetic engineering, a new approach has to be found which brings the scientist and the citizen closer together (Schmidt et al, 2008). This paper will investigate how the public may judge developments in synthetic biology based on a reading of the philosopher Hannah Arendt and her interpretation of the notion of judgment as it is found within Immanuel Kant's philosophy. It appears that Arendt's understanding of judgment is close to the goals of iGEM and that of particular teams to popularize and make the scientific process transparent. However, her stress on the common sense of the public as a prerequisite for judgment points to significant problems for spreading the knowledge of synthetic biology.
