Difference between revisions of "Team:UCL/Human Practices"

OVERVIEW

Ageing is an inevitable process that will affect all of us and it's important that we explore what people from every profession, background and age think about our project as it will impact every single one of us. In the following sections, you can have a glimpse at the decisive factors that drove our project and continue to influence the progress of novel ageing technologies in the future.

Public Engagement/General Public: Biosynthage really wanted to create a project that addresses a current societal need and understand how ageing affects us in later life. Our interactions with the general public involved visiting a Dementia care home, conducting surveys and talking to people on the streets of London.

The experts: From the very beginning we have engaged scientific experts in order to ensure that our project is addressing a genuine need as defined by those who know best.

Industry: To understand the context of ageing industries and where Biosynthage fits and find out how our ideas can be translated from lab to industry, we reached out to opinions of experts from the ageing industry. We received enthusiastic feedback about our idea, strengthen by a feeling of slow progress in ageing industries.

Religion, Synthetic Biology and Ageing: We have been talking to religious leaders and religious members of the public to find out what they they think about our project and synthetic biology and to find an answer to whether religion actually acts as a barrier to the development of synthetic biology.

Our visit to Hamburg dementia home: We have been talking to elderly people who are effected by age related diseases to understand how ageing really effects the ageing population first hand. Have a look at some of the stories of the people at the care home!

Education/Outreach: As a response to our survey which showed that more then 3/4 of the sample wished that they had learnt about synthetic biology at school, we wanted to reach out to as many age groups as possible and run several different educational workshops

Law and regulation in London: We have been talking to members of parliament, UCL political societies and London assembly members to get a view of our project from a law point of view. Will our ideas be accepted into society and will people in London want this?

Public Policy:

Ageing and art:

Our iGEM blog

We also wanted the general public to know about our project and iGEM so we decided to make a blog highlighting our general experiences as we go along this iGEM journey! We are also working on posting some tips for future GEM teams, based on what we are learning as we go through the process.

The Blog link: http://ucligem2016.wix.com/ucligem2016

Our App

As mobile phones are becoming increasing part of our lives, we thought that developing an app may be a great way to get more people more aware of synthetic biology. We have decided to create a game that works by getting users to create certain biobricks, where the gene of interest will only complete the biobrick if the plasmid backbone is cut with the correct restriction enzymes. We want to make it as user friendly as possible and we are hoping to integrate our project and iGEM into the app as well.

In the press

We were able make more people aware of our project by getting our project advertised through the UCL website (Biochemical engineering News section). We are also working on getting the project advertised on the UCL newsletter (myUCL).

Also follow our vlog where we upload fun videos of the team members and vlog throughout our iGEM journey

Is ageing a disease