Difference between revisions of "Team:WPI Worcester/HP/Gold"

Revision as of 21:37, 19 October 2016

Integrated Human Practices
The main goal of our integrated human practices approach this year was to take into consideration the ethics and safety concerns of our project. Throughout the design process, the team interviewed several professors, researchers and graduate students in the fields of RNA therapeutics and CRISPR technology in order to understand their concerns about the team's design. From these conversations, three main concerns arose: the permanence of current gene editing systems, the need for tunability, and public opinion of gene therapy. Each concern was then incorporated into the design of the project. The system was designed to target mRNA to address the permanency aspect of the system. The system was made tunable by incorporating a tetracycline transactivator element that can be controlled by the use of doxycycline. Finally, the team decided that the best approach to ensuring public acceptance of the system was through efficient public education about biological concepts. Through in depth research, the team was able to develop and execute many activities to educate the community about current and future biological ideas.
For more information see our Integrated Human Practices page here.

Improve a Previous Part or Project
Our team improved the characterization of the BioBrick Part BBa_K1321005 with a simple Arsenic Amount Test Kit. We then photographed the test strips and analyzed the images to quantitatively provide characterization. See the part we helped to document here. The measurement details can be found on the Measurement page.

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 <p><img border="0" align="left" hspace="10" src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2016/2/24/T--WPI_Worcester--Integrated.jpeg" style="width:250px;height:340;">
 <br><br><b> Integrated Human Practices </b> <br>
-This summer we held multiple interviews with professors, researchers and graduate students that have worked with CRISPR and/or RNA technology before. We listened to their ideas and tried to incorporate solutions to their concerns into our project. We also talked about the importance of public perception. From these discussions we were able to create community outreach activities to help make biology and scientific research less scary. Through these activities, we were able to reach over 400 people and teach them about simple scientific concepts. By increasing the public's knowledge about biological concepts, we are increasing the likelihood that our research will be accepted because it eliminates the unavoidable fear of the unknown.
+The main goal of our integrated human practices approach this year was to take into consideration the ethics and safety concerns of our project. Throughout the design process, the team interviewed several professors, researchers and graduate students in the fields of RNA therapeutics and CRISPR technology in order to understand their concerns about the team's design. From these conversations, three main concerns arose: the permanence of current gene editing systems, the need for tunability, and public opinion of gene therapy. Each concern was then incorporated into the design of the project. The system was designed to target mRNA to address the permanency aspect of the system. The system was made tunable by incorporating a tetracycline transactivator element that can be controlled by the use of doxycycline. Finally, the team decided that the best approach to ensuring public acceptance of the system was through efficient public education about biological concepts. Through in depth research, the team was able to develop and execute many activities to educate the community about current and future biological ideas.
 <br>
 For more information see our Integrated Human Practices page <a href="https://2016.igem.org/Team:WPI_Worcester/Integrated_Practices">here.</a></p>