How society affects our project and how our project affects society? Those words got stuck in Valencia UPV team when we first read about human practices in iGEM. Science and innovation are nothing if it does not exist a relationship between them and people. We aimed to create a link not only between our project and society, but also between synthetic biology and people. Our team also made a deep study of how HYPE-IT and its usage can improve several factors in communities. In the following lines it is shown a summary of what we made for our human practices. If you want to deeply read about any of this points, you can access the pages through the navigation bar.

Social engagement

One of the first and most important issues for scientist nowadays is the rejection of society towards certain technologies. In the case of synthetic biology and genetic plant breeding techniques, this afraid is remarkable. But the important question is, why does this happen? We conducted a survey about plant breeding techniques, comparing CRISPR/Cas9 with transgenic and other traditional techniques. We concluded, as expected, that the problem relies on education and the lack of communication from scientific community towards non-expert people. For that reason, we decided to do our part and begin to spread the word of synthetic biology. We gave a workshop of genetic and synbio for children between 10 and 12 years old in the City of Arts and Science during the Summer School, with the slogan “Scientists of the Future”. The sooner they begin to understand how synbio works, the better they can analyze and evaluate by themselves its benefits and disadvantages. Our team did not forget about adults. Sometimes is it just necessary to explain in a relaxed and enjoyable way to change minds and convince people. We gave a talk in a pub in Valencia, participating in the initiative “Skepticals in the Pub”, about what is synbio and what can it do for us in the future.

Social engagement

Study of impact on society

Our team was deeply interested on the real impact that our project could have on society at many different levels. The aim of HYPE-IT is to improve accessibility for plant genome editing with CRISPR/Cas9. But, why is this that important? Why do local plant breeders need to access the new plant breeding technologies? Why is important to make it easy for them? What happens if our product begins to be used?
We decided to make a study of the impact of our project on society, at the environmental, economic, social and nutritional level. To do this, we provide three scenarios where HYPE-IT could be beneficial to society. We identify at what extent does HYPE-IT improve those impacts and if it might have unexpected negative effects. This will allow us to re-shape our project accordingly.
To give more support to our purpose of improving accessibility for new plant breeding techniques, we made an economic viability analysis. This analysis will provide us from feedback of how our product should be sold to reach our purpose and at the same time being able to make it sustainable. With the aim to make this analysis realistic, we talked with the main stakeholders for our project: agricultural research centers, seedbeds and farmers.

Study of impact on society

Safety

Finally, it is necessary to assess how our project might affect health and safety in society. Regarding plant genome editing, in the European Union there are serious legal issues, which have not yet been solved for CRISPR/Cas9 editing. It is unclear if EU will approve crops modified with this editing system: the success of HYPE-IT relies on this. A study of how our product might damage or improve the environment by its usage has been made, in order to know if additional safety measures need to be taken in account. The use of viral vectors might also be a concern of our project. However, several containment measures can be made to avoid risks.

Safety