Team:UFMG Brazil/lab
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==Safety== | ==Safety== | ||
===Course=== | ===Course=== | ||
+ | Before performing experiments, we were invited to know more about the lab routine and the procedures required to cope with organisms genetically modified and compounds usually required to perform experiments as well. Everyone interested in performing experiments during the competition was invited to a course to receive instructions and to learn more about the biosafety and its implications on lab working. | ||
+ | The central idea of this course was discuss about what is biosafety, why this is important and what is its implications on lab working. Under this perspective we started reading several texts to increase our knowledge about this theme. Firstly, we started reading the book Manual de biossegurança reader the most important procedures for control, handling and discard of biological products, for avoiding experiment contamination and the vigent law (at least the main) related to manipulation of biological organisms in teaching and researching as well. It is a very detailed book, that helped us to get a notion about where we are inside this big area named biosafety. | ||
+ | Beside this book, we have read some documents related to ethics, since we proposed a mechanism to detect biomarkers in a human serum in order to diagnose heart diseases. It is known that we cannot simply perform any sort of experiments using wild animals or even human to look for results that corroborates hypothesis of a work. But in many cases people do not know what is the correct behavior to use samples gotten from human being or from wildlife for research purposes. That is, until where we can go with research in a way that do not harm the species analysed in the experiment, mainly humans? Each country have its culture and people may have different interpretations of what actions can cause ethical problems a common point for everyone in ethics on researching? | ||
+ | In Biology, a science that deals with life, it is very important define minimal limits which we shall obey to perform tests and other hypothesis validation and avoiding the rising of ethical reprobation by society. In short, the end do not justify the means. Many things can be done towards society, or for its bad as well, using the knowledge acquired inside university. Recently, some a group created a plant with ability to glow in dark people using a mechanism named crowdfunding. The intense interest of common people about this plant cause a general commotion in scientific mean about the consequences of spreading such modified organism unsupervised. It is not easy to predict the behaviour of such organisms into nature as well as its interactions between other organisms in environment. Since the genetical engineering grew as a big research field, many things emerged providing improvements to health (as the production of insulin), to nourishment (production of soy resistant to plagues) and energy (production of biofuels), for example, but all under restrict safety control. | ||
+ | During the course, we talk about such events and we comprehended biosafety not just as a list of rules that must be followed. Beyond of all restrictions applied to ensure safety, biosafety should be understood as what do you do not want carry to your friends, relatives or all sort of people you know in order to keep them safe of any kind of risks. It is more related to avoid risks of being carried from lab to the environment than just hold them in a safe place. In the end we also concluded that we must have our critical sense always keen when dealing with science, mostly with life. | ||
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+ | References [1] Manual de biossegurança/Biosafety manual, Hirata, Mario H., Hirata, Rosário D.C., Mancini Filho, Jorge, 2012 [2] Science and ethics, Iaccarino. M, Nature - EMBO reports vol. 14, September 2013, doi:10.1093/embo-reports/ kve191 [3] Glowing plant spark debate, Callaway, E, Nature 498, 2013 June 06, doi:10.1038/498015a [1] , a collection of texts written focused to teach the [2] . For this reason and many others, ethics is so debated in research. There must be [3] and they were sponsored by | ||
===Hazard=== | ===Hazard=== |
Revision as of 12:14, 25 September 2013