Team:KU Leuven/Human Practices
From 2013.igem.org
Secret garden
Congratulations! You've found our secret garden! Follow the instructions below and win a great prize at the World jamboree!
- A video shows that two of our team members are having great fun at our favourite company. Do you know the name of the second member that appears in the video?
- For one of our models we had to do very extensive computations. To prevent our own computers from overheating and to keep the temperature in our iGEM room at a normal level, we used a supercomputer. Which centre maintains this supercomputer? (Dutch abbreviation)
- We organised a symposium with a debate, some seminars and 2 iGEM project presentations. An iGEM team came all the way from the Netherlands to present their project. What is the name of their city?
Now put all of these in this URL:https://2013.igem.org/Team:KU_Leuven/(firstname)(abbreviation)(city), (loose the brackets and put everything in lowercase) and follow the very last instruction to get your special jamboree prize!
![tree](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/a/ac/Tree.png)
![ladybugcartoon](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/6/64/Ladybugcartoon.png)
Human Practices
As the impact of synthetic biology is exponentially increasing and our project being part of that, we examined the implication of our project for the security, safety and environment. We formulated new approaches to ethical and philosophical considerations. A student of the department of philosophy is part of our team and wrote a blog during this summer together with one of our advisors. We evaluated our project against the background of the literature on ethics and synthetic biology, the so-called normative evaluation and we held a debate on ethical implications of synthetic biology. Next to that, all team members were interviewed to examine their ethical beliefs. The thinking of two philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas, was critically read and taken into synthetic biology to see whether the concepts they use are useful to evaluate synthetic biology. We used a psychoanalytical reading of synthetic biology to explain the current practices in research laboratories nowadays.