iGEM teams are leading in the area of Human Practices because they conduct their projects within a social/environmental context, to better understand issues that might influence the design and use of their technologies.

Teams work with students and advisors from the humanities and social sciences to explore topics concerning ethical, legal, social, economic, safety or security issues related to their work. Consideration of these Human Practices is crucial for building safe and sustainable projects that serve the public interest.

For more information, please see the Human Practices Hub.

iGEM Database

In an attempt to improve the iGEM experience for future teams, we identified a problem central to the iGEM community: the lack of a comprehensive project database. An easy way to search and explore all previous projects performed by our community is necessary. This is particularly useful in the case of building off of the work of others. As science is an iterative process in which all research is built on the backs of other research, a way to navigate previous work is highly useful. Many of us can agree that the wiki system has its benefits; however, few people agree that the information they contain is easily searchable. In an attempt to solve this problem we formed the idea of a database where the most important information of each project could be condensed down into a digestible format. The information we included in each database entry is listed below. You can find our database at www.igem.tech

Each team wiki was cataloged with the following data points:

• Project Title
• Team Name
• Year
• Team Type
• Team Size
• Project Summary
• Keywords
• Chassis
• Track
• Link to Wiki
• Medals earned
• Awards
• Benchmark meet
• Finished Parts
• Killswitch

We hope that a comprehensive and indexable iGEM wiki database will make it easier for teams to build off of the works of others so that we are not reinventing the wheel every year.