Human Practice Overview

Thinking beyond laboratory is one of the key factors that would affect the yield of scientific researches into real social interests. Thankfully, this idea has been recognized by the iGEM community for a very long time. Not only should every team participate in various social activities, but also we need to keep a real time interaction with the society, the place that we ultimately hope to create magnificence.

This year, our team applied the knowledge of synthetic biology to seek feasible solutions to the energy issue. Urgent as it is, the energy issue is more than a regional problem, but has raised global concerns. It is not just the difficulty we are now faced with, but the huge challenge that would greatly restrain the development of our future generations. Lots of researches and studies have been already devoted into the field. However, the challenge still remains, mainly due to the formidable gap between the research studies and the real industrial application. Thus, what our team wants to achieve is not only demonstrating our platform on the lab bench, but also gradually improving the system in the real social context. With this idea in minds, our team kept interacting with people from all walks of life, the industrial community, the academic experts, and the administrative governments, hearing their voice and learning from their comments.

At the very early stage, when we were still brainstorming the idea, our team members actively talked to several top research groups all over the world. It was their insightful words that continuously stimulated our inspirations and promoted our improvements. Some of those groups have closely worked with photovoltaic materials for long; some of them are the leaders in electron transferring in organisms. Also, some of the team members have relatives working in the energy-related industry, so we took the advantages of these connections, searching for advices from an industrial aspect. Through these social dialogues, we not only discussed about the relevant technological operations; besides the team also learnt about the biggest obscures dragging the real application and industrialization with regards of the energy issue. Three criteria for a feasible solution were figured in the conversations, which are reasonable cost, satisfying efficiency, and the most importantly sustainability. With these objectives in heart, we thought over and over again during the whole research process to keep modifying the idea and make it more and more adaptable to the real industrial application. In assistance of these social interactions, lots of progresses and breakthroughs occurred, including the ultimate application of biofilm, a self-assemble, high-resistant, adhesive bio-material, which realize the relative high conductivity as well as the regenerative ability of the system.

Then, soon after we finished the first version of the project, “Solar Hunter I”, we proposed and conducted a public questionnaire, where we further learnt about the public attitude towards the energy issue as well as our project. A serious of general and detailed topics was investigated. From the analysis of the questionnaire, we learnt the biggest two public concerns of the wide application of hydrogen, that was safety and expense. Also, further communications with the industrial community, the academic experts, and the responsible authority were suggested as well.

In response to the subsequent need for further field investigation from various angles, our team then carried out a series of interviews with people working with the energy issue but from different points of view. Not only did we continue to be connected with more and more field experts academically, but also we spared plenty of time and efforts to be in touch with people in the industrial community as well as the government. Through the talks and discussions, we further developed the understanding on the mainstream opinions with regards of the safety concern for hydrogen application both academically and industrially. As those field experts replied, benefiting from some of the characteristics hydrogen possessed, including low density nontoxicity, and zero pollutant emission, hydrogen demonstrated terrific potential as an ideal energy source. Also, with those mature techniques in hydrogen transport and storage, the safety concern is not necessary. However, in terms of the industrial application, most of them laid strong emphasis on the applicability, efficiency, expense and the sustainability about our platform. Reminded by these conversations, our team further considered our system in the context of real industrial use. After a series of brainstorming, we planned to try another co-culture approach where the anaerobic condition was not necessary, instead of the original strategy that extracted the target protein directly. With this improvement, our platform was able to operate under normal aerobic environment, where the manufacture would be much easier and also obviously cost less. Moreover, attracted by our passion as well as the feasible idea, future collaboration with these industrial companies and the local authority would be very likely to be put into real actions later on.

Later on, when we demonstrated the project to some of these field experts again, they were pretty impressed by our soon improvements. As they commented, our new system demonstrated huge potential in massive industrial application. For the next step, they suggested us to work more on the efficiency. Since the electron transfer operated as key step in our system, we then tried to cultivate the biofilm on some small beads, increasing the contact area to achieve a better efficiency. Also, with the application of these small beads, the NRs attached on the biofilm were more easily to be collected and recycled, simply by spinning down the beads.

Additionally, while conducting our research with the interaction in the social context, our team also participated in a variety of educational propagation and public engagements. As the first-ever iGEM team at ShanghaiTech, this year we established the iGEM Day for Public Interests (iDPI), where we held a Lab Open House Day for the visiting high school student from Shanghai Coordinate International School, aiming at arousing their interests in science, especially in synthetic biology. Meanwhile, we introduced the iGEM to them as well, and are now helping them to build their first-ever high school team. Besides, out team collaborated another two iGEM team in China, one at Jiangsu Normal University, and the other at Tsinghua University.

For more details about our Human Practice and Social Engagements, please find the following pages as well as the attached links.

Social Research on the Energy Issue

https://2016.igem.org/Team:ShanghaitechChina/HP/Silver As we described in the introduction and background session, the importance and urgency to work on the energy issue is obvious. The energy issue is neither just a regional nor national problems, but instead a global. In response to the urgent need, lots of scientific researches have devoted vast efforts and time to those relevant studies, however, only few of which are really able to be put into real usage. Therefore, the key issue for the energy issue is not only the technological advancements, but also the awareness to integrate the scientific results into industrial application to yield concrete social values. With this idea in mind that also accord with the requirements for iGEM Human Practice, this year our team conducted the social research on the energy issue, along with our biofilm based artificial photosynthesis platform.

The main objectives of this social research aim at socially figuring out the background information of the energy issue as well as getting prepared for the further industrialization of our project. To understand the situation more comprehensively, we want to hear various point of views from different aspects, the public, the academic, the industrial, and also the authority. Only when opinions from all these parties are heard, could we fully understand the issue in reality and then figure out a series of feasible solutions to contribute to our society.

This social research were performed briefly in two parts, public questionnaire and interviews. A public questionnaire was firstly implemented to collect general information from the public. Then, we carefully analyzed the data collected. And according to the main concerns and opinions we found through the questionnaire, experts from different walk of life were invited to participate in the interview. Our interviewees included scientists working at the cutting-edge in the field, industrial representatives dedicating to the energy conservation, as well as from the administrative government. With the participation of not only the public and the academic, but also the industrial and the authority, we deeply explored the social background to prepare to integrate and industrialize our project as well as built up necessary social connections for the future supports.

Questionnaire

https://2016.igem.org/Team:ShanghaitechChina/HP/Silver A questionnaire about the energy issue was designed and then distributed through the internet. All 37 questions were asked, and here, we performed the core analysis of the questionnaire. We have finally in all collected 231 samples, 15 of which were canceled as invalid samples due to their short answering time (less than 180 seconds). The rest of 216 samples were regarded as valid responds that qualified for further analysis.

1.Respondents’ Backgrounds

A variety of respondents from different age groups, different education backgrounds, and different occupations participated in our questionnaire research. Age distributions can be viewed from the following figure.

Among all, the biggest two age groups participating in the questionnaire are 18-25 and 41-50. About 39% of the respondents were from 18 to 25. 13% aged between 31 to 40. More than 35% were aged between 41 to 50. The diagram shows an ideal age distribution aged from 18 to 50, while there were few respondents under 18 or over 50. Based on the survey on education background, over 77% of the participants were well-educated with at least a bachelor degree who surely share sufficient social experience and intellects. These statistics here demonstrate and ensure the statistical significance underlying this questionnaire.

2. Awareness of the Energy Issue

When investigated on public awareness the energy issue, most respondents as 78% laid strong emphasis on the problem. They considered the energy issue as an extremely urgent social problem that needed to be solved, which strongly illustrates the huge potential value and promise for our project.

3.Knowledge of Green Energy

Asked about whether people were familiar with the green energy, only 13% of the participants chose the most familiarity. Over 51% of the samples showed insufficient knowledge in green energy, which demonstrates the need for more public propagation. And this assumption were then proved by the following question that whether it is necessary to publicly enforce the idea of green energy, with about 95% participants showed positive attitude.

However, when talked about the possible influence from the studies on green energy, over half of the participants declared the strongest attitude. And plus, another 35% were with the second strongest attitude. From this, the promising prospects to apply green energy to deal with the energy issue are apparent. Besides, our team believes that with a wider spread of the background knowledge on the topic, more and more people would be likely to support the study on green energy to solve the energy issue.

We tested on the kinds of green energy well known by the public, where the solar energy ranked first with nearly 88%. Also, we asked about the important characteristics for a good form of green energy; less pollution,strong sustainability, reasonable costs ranked at the top three. Obviously, the application of solar energy perfectly can meet all these three requirements. Also, when asked about the opinion on the application of solar energy as the main energy source, near 88% demonstrated positiveness.

4.Attitude towards Hydrogen

Speaking of the overall attitude towards the present application of hydrogen production, more than half of the participants showed a negative attitude, which was understandable due to the high costs and immature means of industrial production. However, when asked about whether the hydrogen could be a sustainable energy source, a substantial increase in positive attitude could be seen, which showed the huge potential for the further development of hydrogen. Although there were still 45% held a negative attitude towards the application of hydrogen, our team believes that people may become more and more confident about it as long as the technology are much maturer and they are more familiar with the hydrogen with their main concerns eliminated.

In terms of the concerns for the application of hydrogen as an energy source, the biggest two dominating concerns were laid in safety and costs. From a scientific point of view, as long as the transportation and storage of hydrogen is proper to avoid the explosion limits, the usage of hydrogen are relatively safe. (This point were verified by the field professor though the late interview.) Actually, this is pretty much similar to the usage of coal gas and nature gas. Since people can well deal with these two inflammable gas, with the further development of relevant technologies, we hold a pretty positive prospects with regards of the safety problem. However, based on our background search, the way to maintain a relatively low cost producing hydrogen are still not available; and this just demonstrates the huge potential value of our project.

5.About Our Project

We briefly described the idea and mechanism of our energy-conversion platform, gaining about 63% of the positive feedback.Therefore the real application of our platform in a big productive scale is relatively promising and deserves a try. However, we also noticed the 37% with a relatively negative feedback, which also reminded us of further improvements on our idea, especially with regards to the safety, cost, and efficiency based on the feedback from previous question. And we believe that as long as the technology are much maturer and their main concerns are eliminated, people would hold a more positive point of view.

To assist our further integration of our project into real social application, further questions on the necessity of collaborations with industrial partners, academic research groups, and the government were asked.

About 62% of the participants demonstrated the strongest necessity to cooperate with some green energy related enterprises. Near 87% supported to acquire more technological assistance from the academics. More than 62% of the participant thought the supportive policy from the authority was very important for the real application. In responses to these results, further interviews from these three aspects were then scheduled.

Interview

https://2016.igem.org/Team:ShanghaitechChina/HP/Silver In response to the strong necessity to get connected with the industrial, the academics, and the authority, so as to better promote and prepare for the real application and integration of our energy conversion platform and sever the mankind, a series of interviews with the industrial community, academic scientists, and administration and supervision departments were carried out. Taking the chance here, our team would like to extend our sincere gratitude to all those individuals and groups for their assistance and cooperation.

Industrial Community

Established in 1985, Shanghai Energy Conservation Association (SECA) is a membership non-profitable organization that works on the sustainable energy development on behalf of the industrial firms. Most of the local industrial companies, including those very influential ones like Bao Steel, are the members of the association. The SECA is set for the potential industrial collaborations with regards of the energy issue, whose main duties include the industrialization of new energy technologies as well as the propagation of the idea of energy conservation. Most employees working at SECA, including the interviewee, previously worked in the real industry. With their sufficient experience in the field, and also benefits from their daily cooperation with industrial partners, the SECA is undoubtedly an excellent place for our team to seek more insights from the industrial point of view. Also, the comments from the SECA would be of great importance for the industrialization and scale application of our project to yield more social interests.

Our delegation visited the SECA in August, 2016, where we also organized an interview with Mr. Lan (Yujun Lan), director of the expert committee at SECA, and Ms. Chen (Meijuan Chen), vise director of the expert committee at SECA.

At the beginning of the meeting, team member Haolong delivered an brief introduction to our project first. Both Mr. Lan and Ms. Chen were deeply impressed by our dauntless but creative idea. As they commented, they had served for the energy industry for decades, but this was the very first time they heard about using biological platform to provide new energy source as hydrogen gas. From an industrial point of view, they could tell the great future potential and feasibility our project suggested to be further developed into real industrial application in a big scale, meanwhile they also point out that some modifications especially with regards of the working conditions as well as an adaptation to the flow line production would be necessary. Besides, as Mr. Lan further said, the mission of the SECA included the promotion and industrialization of new technology, with their abundant experience in the field, they were willing to assist our team to continuously modify the project and try to put it into industrial application.

Then, Mr. Lan and Ms. Chen briefly talked about the daily operation of the SECA. Additional to the modulation of the membership industrial companies that resulted in a series of collaborations, socially popularizing and promoting the idea of energy conservation was also one of their core objectives. Through their efforts, they were looking for a gradual improvement of social awareness of the energy issus, espceially among the young age group. Annually, a variety of theme activities were held by the SECA to achieve the goal. Every year, there is an Energy Awareness Week took place in Shanghai where the representative industrial delegates were invited to introduce their cutting edge energy technologies to the public, in communities, schools, or exhibitions. Mr. Lan warmly welcomed and invited our team to participate in the next year’s theme week. We were so much sure that this special chance would be an awesome opportunity for our team to not only further socialize and industrialize the project, but also integrate our own efforts into real social needs.

Finally, Mr Lan. And Ms. Chen again emphasized the creativity and huge potential of our project from an industrial aspect. They encouraged us to modulate in details and step further. They were willing to provide any necessary assistance from the industrial community.

Academic Scientists