A Step Towards Our Community - The HKUST iGEM 2013 team had three main objectives in mind for human practice: safe application of our project, bioethics and biosafety, and provision of synthetic biology information for the general public. Each objective was considered carefully and human practice events were developed according to these objectives.
Presentations are one way to share information about our project and iGEM to other people, whether it is to fellow scholars or to the general public. Find out more about our past and upcoming presentations on synthetic biology.
This is a novel human practice project that we did. We thought it was necessary to gain information of synthetic biology in Asian countries to have a holistic view of synthetic biology around the world.
It is necessary to think about how our project could be actually applied. Since gene therapy was mentioned as a mean to deliver our DNA into human liver cells, we thought it was necessary to research on the current gene therapy technology.
We have made several videos to inform the general public about synthetic biology and our project. We tried to make the contents relatively easy so that people with no biology background understand the content.
While working on the Country Profile, we couldn’t find any webpage or blog specifically made to inform people of synthetic biology. So, we decided to make a simple, but interactive blog for the public in Hong Kong written in Cantonese
To discuss the possible safe application of our project, we have met with prominent individuals in Hong Kong society. Through the interviews, we could gain better understanding of our project could actually work as a product.
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.
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.
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.
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