Team:Hong Kong HKUST/experiment/exp1

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 information to the public. We tried to achieve this by making short informative yet interesting videos and an interactive blog that introduce synthetic biology and our project. We have included Cantonese to our work so that the public in Hong Kong can easily digest the information. 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 researched information about synthetic biology in different languages such as English, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Indonesian. 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 already had a semi-formal meeting with SUSTC and CUHK iGEM teams. We have also prepared three more presentations, two for HKUST students, and one for the general public in Hong Kong.