Experts. Valuable new Perspectives.

We highly value interactions with experts from different scientific areas in order to recieve valuable feedback on our project and to reflect on our own work as a student team. When focusing on one specific project for months one might lose sight of the big picture and gets lost in details. Input from experts from inside and outside of our own research was very inspiring and opened up fascinating new perspectives on our project. We discussed our project with multiple experts in order to obtain as much feedback concerning various aspects of our work as possible. We wish to express our gratitude towards Prof. Dr. Rainer Zawatzky for scientific input and safety concerns, Dorothea van Aaken, pedagogue for environmental education and representative of the BUND for safety issues and ethical considerations, the Federal German Armed Forces for safety concerns and finally TBM Edelmetal Recycling, a company in gold recycling for technical and economical input and Dr. Rackwitz from Peptide Specialties Laboratories GmbH for insight in chemical peptide synthesis.

With Mrs. Van Aaken, who not only is a pedagogue for environmental education, but also member of the BUND, we talked about the impact of synthetic biology on environment and on our lives in general. We cannot foresee all consequences and the impact our actions will have for the future – which accounts for both, the interactions of our “creations” with different ecosystems as well as the impact of synthetic food or medicine on our bodies. The evaluation of possible risks arising from them has to be done according to the specific use of the synthetic product. Furthermore, we should return to our essential needs instead of the urge to pile up cheap goods and wealth at the expense of nature and the poor.

Besides this general issue, we also considered the question whether synthetic biology is an artificial process or rather something natural. When interacting with the non-scientific public in general (see below), a common association to synthetic biology was “artificial”. However, we can ask whether synthetic biology actually is human-made artificial or accelerated natural evolution. Addressing these questions in the discussion with Mrs. Van Aaken lead us further in the very theory behind science in general, hence, what natural sciences really are, what nature is and whether our quest for knowledge and technological advance is part of human nature. These considerations opened up an entirely new point of view on what we as scientists-in-training were doing and hence, we thank Mrs. Van Aaken for broadening our horizon during this enlightening afternoon.

Seeing safety concerns as one of the major issues in a Human Practice Advance, we wanted to gain a deeper knowledge of professional biosafety, in this case, defense against biological weapons. We arranged to take part in an open day at the ABC-defense regiment (i.e. atomic, biological and chemical weapon defense) organized by the German Armed Forces. Especially the part about biological weapons was of special interest for us, as many people we talked to pointed out safety concerns as one of their major fears regarding synthetic biology. Hence, we wanted to know, how experts in biosafety approach these issues. Read about our experiences here!

Additionally, as part of our project aims at improving the efficiency of gold-recycling, we concluded that we should gain an understanding of the current methods to recover gold and discuss the potential of our gold recovery approach with experts in this field. Hence, we set up a visit of a delegation of our team to a professional gold-recycling company TBM Edelmetall Recycling. This visit will take place in October, as they are working short time over the summer.