Team:Toulouse France/HP/Gold
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Why we deserve the Gold Medal
Gold
This year, we are eight girls in search of some originality composing the Toulouse iGEM team. When the time to choose our subject came, we liked the idea of going back in time with the exploration of parietal art. Synthetic biology is a very innovative tool, who would have thought it could be used to save 18,000 years old frescoes?
Moreover, we were attracted by the fact the Lascaux cave is a part of our patrimony and very sensitive to its case. We understood that the public would feel involved in our project and it was obvious we had to carefully consider all its implications, even more considering the controversies raised by GMOs in France.
At the beginning of our project, the first step was to get in touch with the scientists and managers who are taking of the cave. The last information we had about the condition of the cave was from 2011 and we needed to know the current issues regarding the cave. People in charge of the cave were pleased by our initiative and thought it is an original way to stand for the conservation of the frescoes. But we wondered a lot about the ethics of our approach: is it necessary to save such old paintings at all cost or are they meant to disappear?
To answer our many questions, we met Vincent Grégoire-Delory, an ethicist who helped us with the elaboration of our ethical reflection. As you will see in our page dedicated to the topic (https://2016.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_France/Human_Practices) we had an intense and productive introspection. Mainly, we debated about the necessity of saving art and about the use of a power tool like synthetic biology in doing so.
But our meeting with Mr. Grégoire-Delory raised others themes we wanted to explore. Among them was the ethic of DNA modification, which is the heart of our project, and of synthetic biology in general. To put this controversy in perspective, we made a video accessible to everyone. We believe this an important subject and the scientists involved in DNA modification, us among others, have to prove they are aware of the challenges.
In a more consistent way, we included safety measures at the design of the project. We found a solution to prevent DNA transfer within bacteria with a shrewd toxin-antitoxin system. We also carefully featured a device to make the dissemination of our Bacillus paleotilis impossible. Our tests in sillico validated the accuracy of our conception.
Another objective for us to reach was to inform about synthetic biology. Indeed, when the first article about our project have been released in France, we realized many people were not all in favor of it because they thought we would create and release a bacteria capable of erasing all microscopic life in the cave. This is why we communicated a lot to explain we took in consideration the dangers related to the dissemination of modified bacteria. We participated to several manifestations of scientific vulgarization all along the year where we exposed the microbial world, synthetic biology and our progress for the project. We reached a large range of public, from five years old children to adults. It was an interesting exercise to have to adapt our speech to the people we were talking to and it was a very instructive exercise for all the stakeholders.
In order to complete our will of instructing people and more precisely the children, we put in place a kit for teaching. We achieve the realization of a first support and hope it will be enhanced by the next team and diffused to schools.
To sum up, we were very implicated in the human practices for our project. We browsed a wild panel of topics and we investigated them deeply. We invite you to read our human practice page for more information.
Website by Team iGEM Toulouse 2016
