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 feedback to build a more rational and societal process during lab work.

To study 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 stakeholders and popularised science for public, through exhibitions and conference . We tried to see how the CRISPR/Cas9 technology could affect law, economics, ethics and politics matters.

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

Then, we integrated the feedbacks into the workflow of our work all through the iGEM competition. In order to have a better feedback on responsibility we build a tool, “The Responsible Research and Innovation Test". This test helped usto 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 these parts had an impact on the project, especially the responsiveness part, where we tried to shape the project with what we learned about reflexivity, anticipation and inclusiveness. We also gave this test to several iGEM teams We also gave this test to several iGEM teams to be able see how well this test worked. See this test, our answers, and the iGEM teams answers here.

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."