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Revision as of 13:02, 21 September 2016
Practices
Visiting Experts
Pieter van Gelder
Date: 01-08-2016
We had an interesting talk with Pieter van Gelder, a professor of safety science at the faculty of technology, policy and management of Delft University of Technology and director of the TU Delft Safety and Security Institute. Professor van Gelder explained to us how his research group analyzes the safety of projects. They use a lot of statistical data in combination with models in order to analyze risks in a systematic way. He stressed that, for example about the risks within the chemical industry and the change of dike breaches is much more data available than about the risks within a new research field such as synthetic biology. “I think a very comprehensive research should be done into the possible risks of synthetic biology. Your tool could be an important starting point of this research.”
Ewold Verhagen
Date: 14-07-2016
Today we talked to Ewold Verhagen, an expert on optics on nanoscales. He explained how whispering gallery modes work and how to take the small length scales compared to the wavelength into account: we should use Mie theory and not whispering gallery modes and ray tracing. Even though the size of our cavities is very small, he was really enthusiastic about our project and said: ‘This is a whole new field where there is much to discover’.
Arjen Amelink
Date: 30-06-2016
We had a great talk with Arjen Amelink, Senior Scientist at the Optics department of TNO, one of the largest research institutes of the Netherlands. Arjen has a lot of experience in the field of micro optics and took a lot of time to brainstorm with us on how to make our project a success. We had a good discussion on to how to reach population inversion, a state where most of the fluorescent proteins are excited, so we will definitely take this into account when setting up our excitation lasers! Also, Arjen told us he was very enthusiastic about our project, but advised us to always keep a real-world application in mind, even with such a fundamental project as ours. He thought that the silicatein, that can assemble monosilica, but also metaloxides, was a promising alternative for 3D printing on microscale. We will definitely look into all these applications and hopefully our project will be useful for a wider range of applications than we already imagined!
Conferences
BESSENSAP
The largest Dutch national conference where scientists, journalists and other science communicators could meet up was this year once again held in Amsterdam. As small-scale scientists, participants of iGEM, and of course as scientists of the future, we participated in the Bessensap conference.
Starting of pitching our project to the audience, we gained positive feedback from interested parties. The day was filled with inspiring talks and workshops. For example the keynote speaker talked about activism in science, arguing all scientists should be activists and changing the future for the better. For this, examples were given showing the importance of communication of different perceptions. This also holds for the iGEM competition, where this immediately could be used in our Policy and Practice. Concluding this inspiring day, a final collaboration in public relations was initiated.
NBC WAGENINGEN
The Netherlands Biotechnology Conference (NBC) is the largest conference for researchers and companies related to biotechnology. This year’s edition with the theme “next level biotechnology” was held in Wageningen. Other than inspiring talks and discussions, we got to meet up with other iGEM teams from the Netherlands. It was interesting to see what the other teams picked as a topic and how they enjoyed the first period of iGEM so far. Overall, it was an informative day and we are looking forward to see the other teams again!
Outreach
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF TECHNOLOGY
On 1 – 3 June, the whole campus of the TU Delft was dedicated to bridging the gap between technology, art and music during the International Festival of Technology. The programme consisted of some famous music artists, lectures by scientists and showcasing all art and technology projects of the university and its students. Of course, we as an iGEM team also took part in this amazing event. Since we were working with fluorescence, our project was incorporated in a night tour through the university. The tour went past all hidden treasures of the university, such as the anechoic chamber, and the iGEM lab which were specially illuminated for the occasion. Other students made use of lights and beamers, we used fluorescence, of course!
The tour was completely sold out so there were a lot of people to amaze and educate with our project! The public got to take a look in the world of fluorescence and learned some fun facts on DNA while we could promote our project. There was also an fluffy E. coli giveaway for the person who could most precisely estimate how often you can go to the moon and back with all DNA of one adult. A lot of people were not aware of the (laser)capacities of microorganisms, but the reaction of the crowd was very positive and enthusiastic, which is of course very good to hear! We are happy that we got to inspire and amaze so many people in just one night, and we hope that our Opticoli will continue to do so!
CAMPUS PARTY
The Campus Party is the greatest technological experience of the world which brings together young technologist and aspiring entrepreneurs in a festival of innovation, creativity, science, digital entertainment and entrepreneurship. It was held in Utrecht and this year we were invited as team.
During the day we enjoined multiple talks and workshops about among other things virtual reality and entrepreneurship. We have learned many interesting things we can use for our project and we had interesting conversations with many technologists about our project. In the evening we have presented our own project. Watch the entire presentation on our YouTube channel. Most of the attendees had no biological background and we started with a basic lecture about synthetic biology therefore. During the presentation we asked them multiple question about their opinion about synthetic biology and It appeared that more than 90% of the attendees have a positive outlook towards synthetic biology. After this we off course discussed our project and fortunately most people were very enthusiastic. We are happy that also people from outside our research field are enthusiastic about our project and about synthetic biology in general.
Safety Tool
Safe by design synthetic biology
As an independent organisation, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment of the Netherlands (RIVM) helps the government. Its goal is to protect the quality of the environment, including new techniques and innovations. Synthetic biology is such an upcoming field, with a lot of potential to solve societal problems. However, this technology is new and majority of its safety regulations are not set in legislations yet. The RIVM wishes to improve safety on every level, thereby implementing a safe-by-design principle in the field of synthetic biology. This principle encourages designers to design the product in such a way that health and safety risks are not forming a problem. Safety should be entailed within the design process.
For this, the RIVM asked the five different iGEM teams to provide them with their view on safe-by-design and how we would implement this during our project. An insightful day, full of discussions, was organised, in which was asked to present our vision and a plan how to implement the safe-by-design principle in our iGEM projects. Hopefully, this will provide the RIVM a way to implement a safe-by-design principle in the synthetic biology field.
