Team:IIT Kharagpur/Human Practices
HUMAN PRACTICE
Meetups
As we know that the progress of the civilization depends upon the amount of value added and shared by the community. Advances in the field of Synthetic Biology, similarly, has to be shared to the community as a whole in order for something valuable to come out of it. Hence, in the pursuit of this, we have tried to involve the community as far as possible be it in the form of revolving the ideation of new application around the community's needs or making it feasible to share with them the work put behind achieving the idea. Having this mindset, we have collaborated with some of the iGEM teams, brought them together to share each other's idea, discuss their intricacies, issues, potentials and further collaboration opportunities.
Upholding the spirit of iGEM, this year, we organized our own online meetup. This is the first time iGEM IIT Kharagpur has organized its own meetup and also to join us were the experienced teams of India viz. iGEM IIT Delhi, iGEM IIT Madras and iGEM IISc Bangalore and also first time iGEM participant from Pakistan, iGEM Peshawar. The meetup was conducted through Skype. The format of the meetup was to discuss each idea through a presentation for about fifteen minutes following which a short question-answer session of five minutes was kept to clarify the doubts and a general discussion session about the problems with the project, opportunities for workshops and collaborations etc was kept post the completion of all the discussions. Since iGEM Peshawar is the first time iGEM participant, we kept a seperate Skype session with them the following day where we discussed about the overall logistics of iGEM at length and there were many crucial questions raised by them regarding the same which we tried to address.. Each one of the teams discussed were working on different and innovative ideas which were appreciated by all. Some useful suggestions were discussed for each of the teams after their presentations, and all discussions were very productive and propitious for the teams in general.It was a great networking opportunity and a chance to know the fellow Indian subcontinental teams well.
The IIT Delhi team, this year, is working on modifying the Danino Oscillator. IISC Bangalore plans on working on reducing production costs, by replacing the centrifugation step by an autoaggregation step of their design. IIT Madras meanwhile is working on 2 different aspects, one of them being testing noise in devices, and the other being a ribose switch.
Workshops
Using the biobrick repository of iGEM Foundation, India has a tremendous potential to contribute in newer applications of Synthetic Biology. We initiated an ‘iGEM India Campaign’ under which we conducted several workshops and published articles in national newspapers and magazines.
DAV Model school, Kharagpur
DAV Trust is an educational organization in India with over 800+ schools and 75+ colleges. Collaborating with DAV Trust, we organized an interactive workshop at DAV Public School which saw participation of over 70 high school students. Competing under high school division with international teams at Giant Jamboree of iGEM is a great opportunity for these young students. We received a good response from the students and faculties who were quite enthusiastic and were eagerly interacting throughout the workshop. The workshop at DAV Model school, Kharagpur, was aimed at spreading the concepts of synthetic biology and about the iGEM competition. through a comprehensive presentation which also involved previous and this year’s ideas.
University of Kolkata, Kolkata
One of the most successful workshop was organized at the University of Calcutta where 3 professors and around 60 students were inspired by our team of undergraduates and we extensively discussed their feasibility to participate in iGEM in 2017.
The workshop at University of Kolkata was attended by postgraduate students. It was aimed at spreading the concept of Synthetic Biology and introducing them to iGEM and to encourage a participation from them. The students were quite enthusiastic about the presentation and also about iGEM. They were postgraduate students and therefore had an idea about Synthetic Biology and understood our project quite well. Workshop started with presentation by the members of our team. The presentation included information on iGEM, our current idea and past idea as well as some path breaking ideas of other teams during the previous iGEM competitions. After the presentation, there was some good discussion about the scope of the project and suggestions from their side about further modifications and lab work. The students and teachers were quite welcoming regarding the participation in IGEM. We hope to see a post graduate team from their institute some time in the future!
Survey
In today’s scenario where people have an opinion about anything and everything based upon the general view or from the opinion of subject who is followed by them which has become increasingly apparent due to the outreach of social media, it becomes essential to impart the correct knowledge among the people on a subject by the people actually involved in the field. Conducting a survey is great way to know the general perception of people and to find a way to address the incorrect perceptions and hence reduce the information gap. Synthetic Biology is one area where there are many ethical questions being raised based on the beliefs of the masses. Since this area of technology is progressing at a great pace and the applications are becoming more and more diverse, it is not so far in the future when they will have made it into our day-to-day lives. Hence, the public opinion on the subject is ought to be taken to check for the acceptance of the applications.
Our project is based on making industrial benefit in production of spider silk using E.Coli. bacteria. It is about minimization of production cost of spider silk using E.Coli. bacteria by introducing concept of extracellular secretion of spider silk by cloned E.coli.
As a part of our online knowledge sharing campaign, to understand the views of common man about applications of synthetic biology, we published two surveys . The first survey is essentially focused on getting broad overview of understanding of Synthetic Biology among common people. The second survey aimed at understanding the popular opinion regarding silk and its uses and potential applications of our idea.
First Survey
Our first survey aspires to establish a dialogue is first step to understand the needs and sentiments of community to gather their ethical, financial and social perspective which effectively communicated to scientists and policy makers will result in focused development in research. We received an overwhelming number of responses for this survey (more than 200 responses).Based on the information collected, we also performed the following series of statistical analyses to draw critical and relevant inferences from the point of view of a sustainable and efficient implementation of our project idea.
Second Survey
This survey aims at understanding the popular opinion regarding silk and its uses, and the potential applications of our idea.
Media articles
Dr. John Bardeen, only Physicist to have won Nobel Prize twice once said, “Advancements in science is a collaborative effort”. Our team published an article about our experience of participating in iGEM in Hindustan Times, India’s second most read english newspaper. Public perception is one of the major gaps in biotechnology.
