Team:Imperial College/HP/Silver
As part of their human practices, foundational projects generally aim to educate the public about synthetic biology as a whole, rather than engage with them about the present and future development of their specific technology. However, a central aspect of human practices and responsible innovation is to embed the idea of reflexivity into the development of technology itself. It is unclear what it means for synthetic biologists to pursue reflexivity themselves. Since we were pursuing a foundational project, we took to the opportunity to make reflexivity a central part of our research. That meant working with and adapting for iGEM teams the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) protocol developed in response to the Human Genome Project. The STIR protocol aims to provide a structured reflexive process to assess and shape the outcome of our project after considering its greater societal, environmental, and economic impacts. We provided a well-documented account of its impact on our wiki, as well as a template for future foundational iGEM teams and researchers.
For the gold medal criteria we integrated the STIR protocol into our project.
