Team:Valencia Biocampus/HP

Safety issues are –or should be- one of the most important parts in each project. Valencia Biocampus team, concerned with that, worked on several aspects of it. We filled up the Basic Safety Form, a second Biosafety Form and we answered the four interesting biosafety questions.

Innovations are global in reach and potential. They are the source of considerable competitive advantages. The challenge of RRI is achieving a balance between innovation and growth with the need for effective, safe and appropriate products.

Going deeper into the iGEM contest we wanted to enhance how different teams from all over the world during these almost 10 years of competition have dealt with the six fundamental keys of RRI. To know more download our RRI report.

The iGEM News were concibed as a transparency exercise that our team wanted to do in order to show how were our lab journeys. In our Youtube channel we told our viewers about the development of the project, the results, the collaboration with other teams, we showed them the picture of the day from our Instagram account and some sketches to make our followers feel closer to us. We thought that these iGEM News were the most original and enjoyable way of showing the effort that our team was doing for making our synthetic symbiosis possible. Also, we thought that the best way to get in touch with people was to make them understand that they could help to young scientists as us by our crowdfunding campaign. We made a video in which we told them about our project and about how important is Science in our lives and the possibilities that Synthetic Biology can offer.

In relation to what RRI really is, we thought that asking scientists could be an interesting view of reality. RRI defends the constant dialogue between science and society. But do scientists really listen to what our society needs? We contacted hundreds of scientists from all over the world and from all branches with one simple question: how do you choose your research topic? We sadly concluded that personal interest is the main factor when they have to decide about their research topic. For further conclusions and more details, we invite you to have a look at our survey, which is included in our RRI report that can be downloaded.