Integrated Practices

Integration of Responsibility into the project: building an intellectual scheme for a more rational and societal process

While working on our Human Practices, we saw that the CRISPR/Cas9 technology was a complex subject, and that we should have a really responsible use of it. This research lead us to build a test which worked as a feed-back to build a more rational and societal process during lab work.

Indeed, studying how our project affects society and how society affects our project was at the very heart of our project. We were interested first about the potential societal issues of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology. We conducted several actions, met with stakeholders and popularised science for public. We tried to see how the CRISPR/Cas9 technology could affect law, economics, ethics and politics matters.

See here to learn more about our work on the societal issues of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology.

Our conversations with stakeholders directly affected the experiments we had in the lab. We met in a first time a lot of scientists to shape our foundational project. As an example, we met the professor Olivier Espéli or the researcher David Bikard which helped us a lot to define our project and what we had to do in lab work.

Then, we integrated feedback into the workflow of our work all through the iGEM competition. In order to have the best feed-back on responsibility in our work we build a tool, “the Responsible Research and Innovation test". This test helped us to see if our project really meets the societal needs we wanted to reach : its goal was to bring innovation and societal needs closer. This test was divided in four parts, reflexivity, anticipation, inclusiveness and responsiveness. Each of this part had an impact on the project, especially the responsiveness part, where we tried to shape the project with what we learn with reflexivity, anticipation and inclusiveness. We also gave this test to several iGEM teams in order to see how well this test worked. See this test, our answers, and the iGEM teams answers here.

Thus, the contribution of Human Practices to lab work was not solely material : we built an intellectual scheme that helped us to lead our researches in a more responsible way. As iGEM Imperial acknowledged, it changed our decision making into a more rational and societal process.

And finally, as IGEM Taïwan said in our test : « Reflexivity makes you a good start; inclusiveness makes you a good connection; anticipation makes you a good hope. »