Team:UT-Knoxville/HP/Silver
UTK
iGEM
Human Practices
We have concentrated on three Human Practices topics: Environment, Public Engagement/Dialogue, and Education.
With a project dedicated to cleaning up wastes from the oil industry, our team’s human practices application primarily falls under the sustainability and environmental category. It is well known that worldwide reliance on energy from nonrenewable sources is high, and though there is effort being put forth to reverse this, our goal is to fix problems that exists in our current largest energy global sources. Making sure that crude oil is both processed and stored in a safe, environmentally sound way is vital and will remain so as long as crude oil is refined. However, guidelines for how to do so are not always followed or suitable, and as discussed in our project description storage and processing present a number of issues. Even if oil dependence was eliminated, many of the toxins we aim to remediate already exist in large quantities and must be reconciled with, though they might one day be produced at a lower rate.
The UTK iGEM team also addressed human practices by engaging the public and raising awareness of synthetic biology and our own work at a local museum, two high schools, and by hosting a GMO panel for students on campus. Our goal was to guide people in our area to a better understanding of what synthetic biology is and how it affects us daily, and how it might affect us all in the future. We hosted or participated in several outreach events targeted at age groups from young children to undergraduates. Further description of each our GMO panel, high school visits, work with local high school students in our lab, and museum event can be found below.
