Team:UCL/Human Practices
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OUR STORY
We are all stakeholders in ageing hence why Biosynthage has been steeped in controversy since its very inception. However, with controversy comes important questions. Some believe that we should not meddle with the human ageing process and others believe that we should think of ageing as a disease in order to start treating it. Biosynthage has really enjoyed exploring the depths of many debates which has caused us to constantly stop and reevaluate the next step forward within our project. We are constantly realising that with every new person we speak to, we uncover depths of new perspectives we never knew existed within in our story.
In the following sections, you can have a glimpse at the decisive factors that drove our project and continue to influence the progress of our novel technologies in the future.
Public Engagement/General Public: Biosynthage 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 conducting surveys and talking to people on the streets of London.
Our visit to Hamburg dementia home: We have been talking to elderly people who are affected by age related diseases to understand how ageing affects the ageing population first hand. Have a look at some of the stories of the people at the care home!
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.
Law in London: If people were living healthier lives for longer, how would this impact law? Will the minimum pension age increase? Will there be a shift in the social demographics? Will this be a good thing to London and the world? We have been talking to members of parliament and London assembly members to explore the long term impacts of our novel technologies.
Religion, Synthetic Biology and Ageing: We have realised that much of the elderly population is the most reliogous out of all age ranges. So we wanted to investigate the impact of religious perspectives on the science policy pertinent to our project (i.e. biotechnology, synbio, gene therapy). Find out about what we learnt through our talks with religious members of the public, religious leaders and our round table event with religious community leaders.
Education/Outreach: Our survey showed that not only do people feel like they don’t know enough about synthetic biology, but they wish that they learnt synthetic biology at school. We really enjoyed reaching out to the younger generation through our workshops, summer schools and building our app!
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
