Team:Edinburgh UG/Engagement
Engagement
Public Engagement
Over the course of the summer we were lucky enough to interact with and share our project with people in our community.
SynBioBeta
In July we attended the SynBioBeta Activate conference at the University of Edinburgh King’s Buildings. Highlights were hearing Emily Leproust from Twist Bioscience, Axel Trefzer from ThermoFisher and Kevin Munnelly from Gen9 do a panel discussion on DNA data storage. It was encouraging to hear the leaders in DNA synthesis speak about how DNA is the future of data storage.
During breaks and the networking lunch we walked around and talked to people about our project. Naturally, many attendees were familiar with iGEM and were quire excited to hear about our project. We printed out flyers before the day to hand out so people could find out more about our project. Although engagement is often seen to be an opportunity to share synthetic biology with non-experts, we really enjoyed engaging with professionals in the synthetic biology community and getting their feedback!
National Library of Scotland: Learning at Work Week
As part of our collaboration with the National Library of Scotland, we were invited to give a workshop during their “Learning at Work Week”. We put together a presentation including the background to our project, the basics of the biology and what we had achieved over the course of the summer.
The workshop also included an interactive activity that demonstrated the data-DNA encoding and decoding process. The audience was split up into small groups of 3, each group also included a member of our team. The groups had a basket of DNA bases printed on paper – synthetic nucleotides, if you will – that they had to put together and encode to the words in a given sentence. This demonstrated how depending on the length of a DNA fragment, the number of possible encoding changes. This process mirrored ours at the start of the summer when we were determining the content of a BabbleBrick.
After ‘assembling’ their new BabbleBricks together, another group had to decode this sentence. The participants said that doing the interactive activity helped engage them and as non-experts at biology they felt it made our project clearer to them.
Stakeholders and specialists in the field
We reached out to a large number of specialists from many fields that our project ties together. To that end, we spoke to the following people:
Ethics specialists
Joyce Tait, who explained about gold plating - researchers and policy makers putting the maximum security possible into their work even if not necessary. This might actually make the public fearful, because they believe there is something dangerous about the technology being developed. Gold plating actually makes the public more worried and reinforces negative stereotypes about new technologies. This is why we have been careful not to make assumptions about what the public believes about science and technology, and to be cautious about how to phrase the security precautions incorporated in our project.
Tristam Riley-Smith: External Champion, Partnership for Conflict, Crime & Security Research: who spoke to us about the importance of clarity and openness of research, public information, open discussions about ethics with philosophers. We also discussed the new policy that he is currently working on for RCUK (Research Councils UK).
Librarians
EDINA, data librarians from the university of Edinburgh. They recommended that we keep track of the hardware and software being used to read stored data; DNA sequencing technologies aren’t likely to go “out of fashion”, but others - like tape reading technology - is. They also raised issues concerning methods for encoding, retrieval, storage (room conditions), retrieval fidelity, destruction. We considered all of these and are having a meeting about storage with them again. We have also considered the issue of data fidelity, which we are combatting with our error correction mechanisms. They finally asked about how text decorations such as italics, bold etc. can be encoded, but this does not pose a problem in our case since each of our BabbleBricks can code for any arbitrarily defined value.
Lee Hibberd, NLS: really liked our idea as their archival data storage because of the limitations that tape storage imposes. Storing on tape requires renewal every years, is prone to error and needs manpower and time.
EPCC: Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
Liked our project, gave us advice on the speed at which human language changes and might affect the comprehensibility of our stored data. They also gave us a lot of insights into what audiences we should target that might be interested in using our technology (end users).
Computer Security
We chatted with several informaticians who all recommended we use a stream cipher for our encryption.
Erika Szymanski and Pablo Schyfter
They suggested that we limit our scope for the project - we shouldn’t assume that all users (people or companies that want to store information) will find our project equally useful. We should isolate specific cases and design a solution for them.
Other iGEM Teams
We have been actively engaging with other iGEM teams from Scotland, England and the world. We have had many Skype sessions with them and exchanged a lot of ideas about project implementation, as well as Policy and Human Practices. Specifically we were inspired by the Newcastle iGEM team to use the stress-induced Dps proteins, which is found in Deinococcus radiodurans and serves to protect DNA from stress-related damage. This ties in very well with the rest of our project, as one of our aims is to be able to preserve DNA with as high fidelity of retrieval as possible, for as long as possible.
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