Human Practice

The HKUST iGEM 2013 team had three main objectives in mind for human practice: safe application, bio-ethics & bio-safety, and provision of information of synthetic biology for the general public. Each objective was considered carefully and human practice events were developed accordingly to these objectives.

Safe application:

We thought safe application was a very important aspect of our project because we thought that in the future our project will probably be directly applied on humans. We tried to incorporate a foreign inducible metabolism into human liver cells; therefore we had to consider safe application to eliminate possible complication that our project could cause. We have approached this aspect by meeting two prominent scientists in Hong Kong society who are currently actively participating in scientific and medical research. They helped us to realistically view our project in their point of view and to think about the possible concerns that can arise if we try to transform our project into a product. With the experts, we have discussed mainly three matters: application of our project, biosafety & bio-ethical issues concerning our project, synthetic biology in Hong Kong and in Asia in general.

Bio-ethics & Bio-safety:

We went beyond fulfilling the minimum iGEM competition requirement of filling in the safety sheet. Because applying foreign DNA or cells into human is currently not a widely used technology, we thought it would be necessary to research on some these techniques. During the interviews with the experts, gene therapy was mentioned and we did some research to write an informative article about it. In the article, we have provided some background information of gene therapy, discussed the bio-ethical and bio-safety issues concerning gene therapy, and thought about if gene therapy could be used as an application of our project.

Provision of Information:

The concept of synthetic biology is not prevalent in Hong Kong and in Asia. We thought it was imperative to provide some information to the public, especially for the public in Hong Kong. We tried to achieve this by making short informative yet interesting videos that introduce synthetic biology and our project. We have included Cantonese subtitles in the video so that the public in Hong Kong could digest the information more easily. We have also made an interactive blog and posted information of synthetic biology and our experience in iGEM in both Cantonese and English. While we were gathering information about synthetic biology. We observed inadequacy in the amount of information of synthetic biology in Asia. To amend this problem, we have decided to use our wide ethnic diversity of our team and research information about synthetic biology in different languages such as English, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Indonesian and compile the information in English. We have complied information of synthetic biology in four East Asian countries/regions and one South East Asian country. We believe that this novel approach will help the reader to have more holistic and unbiased view of synthetic biology all around the world.

We also had time to share our experience and thoughts to various different people through presentations. We have prepared two presentations, one for HKUST school of science students and another for school of engineering students. We hope these presentations could deliver the idea of synthetic biology and promote freshmen students to participate in the competition next year. We also had a semi-formal meeting with Southern China University of Science and Technology (SUSTC) and Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) iGEM teams. Teams briefly shared our projects and received feedbacks from other teams. Lastly, we have confirmed a presentation opportunity at the annual InnoCarnival organized by the Hong Kong government which will take place in November. This event is open to public in Hong Kong and we will present for an hour to share our project and how synthetic biology could be used for human health.

Interview

Presentation

Gene Therapy Article

Videos

Country Profile

Blog