Team:Paris Bettencourt/Human Practice/Overview

A comprehensive and quantitative study of gender (in) equality in iGEM and synthetic biology. When looking at TB epidemiological facts, women and men are strikingly not affected equally. The origins of this difference are both genetic and cultural. This brought us to self-reflect on our own community. We used a quantitative approach: a database was gathered to depict sex ratio in teams' students and and supervisors in all iGEM teams as well as other available information. This was statistically analysed to investigate gender in(equality) in iGEM, as well as SB convergences as synthetic biology lab.

Tackling the question of technology transfer in TB R&D field. Tuberculosis is most widespread in so-called “developing” countries. For this reason, it was impossible for us to work on this disease without taking into account the fact that we were designing in France a technology that was aimed precisely at those countries, rather than at “developed” ones: a typical case of technology transfer.