Team:LMU-TUM Munich/HP/Silver

In our project from this year, we put a great emphasis on the Human Practices track. We cover several of the multi-facet fields that iGEM summarizes under Human Practices. Furthermore, we aimed at excellence in all the projects that we conducted. We not only scratched the surface but deeply investigated safety concerns, designed and organized educational courses. We even hosted a public outreach event on the topic of „Perspectives of synthetic biology in biotechnology and medicine”. We proudly present our achievements on the pages that are linked below.

SAFETY: Interview with member of national biosafety panel (ZKBS) Professor Dr. Alfons Gierl

On our Safety page we listed interviews with different experts in the field of biosafety & bioprinting. One of the examples we would like to mention here was the interview with Prof. Dr. Gierl, who is a retired professor and was a member of the German Biosafety Panel (ZKBS) for many years. In his work for this panel he decided on how different organisms and genetic constructs were listed in Germany concerning their safety profile. For us it was very interesting to hear what he told us on the question what our generation should do different with the SynBio discussion compared to the GMO discussion the scientiest have lost against the public fear decades ago. His response was that he does not believe that it will be possible to ultimately win this discussion as the majority of the people does not listen to facts but rather to emotions.

Education

We created a smart board educational course. With this interactive course we want to raise interest for the possibilities that SynBio offers by inspiring students and teachers.

Please refer to the main article here.

PUBLIC OPINION: Panel discussion on SynBio

We hosted a large public outreach event. Leading scientists, medical doctors, tech communicators, and ecologists discussed „Perspectives of synthetic biology in biotechnology and medicine”. Our event was extremely well visited. The audience followed the interesting panel discussion and we had a delightful interactive session afterwards.

Please refer to the main article here.