“Do you play with DNA models?” “No, we play with real DNA.” “Wow! Then…you work under microscope, right?”
This conversation truly happened to us for many times, in school with classmates and at home with relatives. Many people including high school students in our school have completely no idea of operating on DNA, which seems so inaccessible. We desperately want to change this situation, so that more talented and passionate people can enter and work in this field.
However, throughout the whole year’s experience, we were more and more convinced that only lectures cannot let the ideas penetrate into people’s lives. The ideas should be gradually delivered through daily media under delightful and relaxing conditions. Therefore, we chose Wechat Subscription Account to achieve this purpose.
To promote and let more people join the competition is also important. Therefore, we have presented in two organizations: Chinese Academy of Science and Meisha International High School to promote iGEM competition and help them build new teams.
The concept of “Maker”, highly promoted and increasingly popular in nowadays world, encourages everyone to make everything everywhere. iGEM, an interdisciplinary project that covers the area of biology, mechanics and computer science, etc, is a high implementation of “Maker” concept and is considered as bio-hacking. Because of the bacteria’s massive reproduction and the direct operation on genes, bio-hacking has great potential in the future.
However, in Maker Area, at least in Shenzhen, bio-hackers are still the minority. Most maker projects are still on mechanics such as robots and chips, and people including students and adults have barely any idea of bio-hacking. Therefore, we felt a great urgent to promote bio-hacking in Maker’s area and more importantly, among all people, to spread the idea that operating genes is as normal and accessible as using screws.
Project into the world: In-depth investigation in hospital
A project without basis in the reality is just a useless clothes displayed in window. To make our project contribute to the society better, we considered it necessary to thoroughly understand the nowadays situation. On 7th Octover 2016, four of our team members visited Shenzhen No.2 People’s Hospital. Welcomed by doctor Song Ting in Department of Orthopedics, we learned about current chronic wound treatments, investigated how chronic wound affect patients’ lives and got inspired by materials used in hospital as well. Then based on the investigation, we evaluate on and improve our project based.
We conducted three researches on: trend of iGEM project, on policies regarding synthetic biology in China, and specific researches on costs regarding chronic wound treatments.
