Engagement

Public Engagement

Over the course of the summer we were lucky enough to interact with and share our project with people in our community.

SynBioBeta

In July we attended the SynBioBeta Activate conference at the University of Edinburgh King’s Buildings. Highlights were hearing Emily Leproust from Twist Bioscience, Axel Trefzer from ThermoFisher and Kevin Munnelly from Gen9 do a panel discussion on DNA data storage. It was encouraging to hear the leaders in DNA synthesis speak about how DNA is the future of data storage.

We were also featured on a Greek news website, where we did the same. http://www.zarpanews.gr/

We had the opportunity of writing an article for the PLoS SynBio blog, which focussed on our project and its implementation: http://blogs.plos.org/synbio/2016/06/23/igem-blogs-the-dna-typewriter-edinburgh-igem-2016/

All these activities gave us the chance to contact a large number of people from vastly different backgrounds, and importantly from backgrounds without any previous contact with current trends in biological research, like synthetic biology and genetic engineering. This was important for us in the sense that it made us aware of how the “language barrier” and “understanding barrier” between scientists and the general public can and should be overcome. It made us adept at stripping our ideas and methods to the essentials and phrasing them in such a way that people from all walks of life can understand what our goals are and how they can have an impact in our daily life.

This was also instrumental in getting us to understand the importance of explaining our ultimate aims more clearly, and not focussing on painstaking detail from the technical and laboratory aspect.

Stakeholders and specialists in the field

We reached out to a large number of specialists from many fields that our project ties together. To that end, we spoke to the following people:

Ethics specialists

Joyce Tait, who explained about gold plating - researchers and policy makers putting the maximum security possible into their work even if not necessary. This might actually make the public fearful, because they believe there is something dangerous about the technology being developed. Gold plating actually makes the public more worried and reinforces negative stereotypes about new technologies. This is why we have been careful not to make assumptions about what the public believes about science and technology, and to be cautious about how to phrase the security precautions incorporated in our project.

Tristam Riley-Smith: External Champion, Partnership for Conflict, Crime & Security Research: who spoke to us about the importance of clarity and openness of research, public information, open discussions about ethics with philosophers. We also discussed the new policy that he is currently working on for RCUK (Research Councils UK).

Librarians

EDINA, data librarians from the university of Edinburgh. They recommended that we keep track of the hardware and software being used to read stored data; DNA sequencing technologies aren’t likely to go “out of fashion”, but others - like tape reading technology - is. They also raised issues concerning methods for encoding, retrieval, storage (room conditions), retrieval fidelity, destruction. We considered all of these and are having a meeting about storage with them again. We have also considered the issue of data fidelity, which we are combatting with our error correction mechanisms. They finally asked about how text decorations such as italics, bold etc. can be encoded, but this does not pose a problem in our case since each of our BabbleBricks can code for any arbitrarily defined value.

Lee Hibberd, NLS: really liked our idea as their archival data storage because of the limitations that tape storage imposes. Storing on tape requires renewal every years, is prone to error and needs manpower and time.

EPCC: Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre

Liked our project, gave us advice on the speed at which human language changes and might affect the comprehensibility of our stored data. They also gave us a lot of insights into what audiences we should target that might be interested in using our technology (end users).

Computer Security

We chatted with several informaticians who all recommended we use a stream cipher for our encryption.

Erika Szymanski and Pablo Schyfter

They suggested that we limit our scope for the project - we shouldn’t assume that all users (people or companies that want to store information) will find our project equally useful. We should isolate specific cases and design a solution for them.

Other iGEM Teams

We have been actively engaging with other iGEM teams from Scotland, England and the world. We have had many Skype sessions with them and exchanged a lot of ideas about project implementation, as well as Policy and Human Practices. Specifically we were inspired by the Newcastle iGEM team to use the stress-induced Dps proteins, which is found in Deinococcus radiodurans and serves to protect DNA from stress-related damage. This ties in very well with the rest of our project, as one of our aims is to be able to preserve DNA with as high fidelity of retrieval as possible, for as long as possible.