Difference between revisions of "Team:Exeter/HP/Gold"

Revision as of 20:49, 19 October 2016

Human Practices - Gold Award

The Gold HP section is covered in more detail in the Integrated human practices section which can be found here.

In essence we looked to integrating our human practices in two distinct ways - lab integration and out-of-lab integration.

Lab Integration

We wanted to integrate Human Practices concepts into our lab work, by interviewing researchers from academia and industry, to see what their ideal kill switch would be, in order for us to embed this into the design of our project. We initially spoke to Dr Tom Ellis of Imperial College London who informed us that kill switches are both correctly classified in Biosafety and they have the capability of being an effective bio-containment measure. He believed that multiple kill switches in one system would have applications in academia because it could reduce the error rates to “less than one in a billion”. Consequently, our idea for an operon of kill switches, with KillerRed and KillerOrange in the same system, was well grounded. However, when speaking with Markus Geshater of Synthase Ltd. he argued that multiple kill switches in one system, or even one kill switch in a system, would reduce the efficiency of the protein or molecule they were trying to produce. Consequently, we moved our idea from testing multiple kill switches, to testing whether kill switches themselves can be effective measure in industrial or academic use. We further spoke to Professor Richard Titball who said: “Realistically it is going to have to be a genetically determined biocontainment system”, which led us to look for ways of producing kill switches that attacked the DNA, and hence our work on CRISPR and DNAse I. More information of this can be found on our lab project page here.

Out-of-lab integration

We also wanted to find a novel way of integrating our Human Practice work into itself, as we believe that this allows us to form well grounded research into areas such as equality and diversity. We initially spoke to students to understand their perspectives on the issue of gender inequality in science, highlighted in a video. At the end of the video, we spoke to our supervisor, Dr Chloe Milner, who said that whilst she had never experienced sexism directly, all of her bosses were men and only one of her lecturers had been a woman, and she didn’t know if this was a sign of times past or present but it would be interesting to see why. Because of this, we decided to find out why this was the state of affairs at the university.

This led us to a meeting with Dr Andrew Griffiths, chair of Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity group for Biosciences at the university. He talked about issues such as a lack of confidence in women, ways of making the workplace more flexible and inclusive for all and the issue with maternity and paternity support and the potential for a parental leave to be introduced.

We took these concepts to Dr Eduarda Santos, the former chair of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity committee for Bioscience, for a different perspective. We followed this pattern throughout the series of six interviews, adapting and evolving the argument as we went, commenting on previous interviews and the thoughts and experiences shared with us.

This series of interviews concluded with a panel discussion on equality and diversity which integrated our public engagement and education work into the integrated equality and diversity work, for we opened up a two-way discussion with students and the public via a live discussion in front of a crowd that was also live streamed on Youtube, via XTV Online, and live broadcasted on campus radio, Xpression FM. We succeeded in highlighting the issues of equality and diversity in science, using the university as a case study, but we also succeeded in educating the public and providing a platform for further debate and discussion to be held. More information of this integrated work can be found in our Integrated Human Practice work here.

We further created a module for second year Bioscience students which integrates the key concepts of iGEM and the structure of an iGEM competition to educate students on synthetic biology. The way the module is assessed is in a small replica of the iGEM competition, with presentation, poster and research article. We believe this is a novel way of integrating the iGEM competition into our Human Practices work, that can inspire students to both be more involved in synthetic biology as a field, and potentially get involved with iGEM in the future. Information about the module can be found here.

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