Human Practice Overview

Thinking beyond laboratory is one of the key factors that would affect the yield of scientific researches into real social interests. Thankfully, this idea has been recognized by the iGEM community for a very long time. Not only should every team participate in various social activities, but also we need to keep a real time interaction with the society, the place that we ultimately hope to create significance.

This year, our team applied the knowledge of synthetic biology to seek feasible solutions to the energy issue. Urgent as it is, the energy issue is more than a regional problem, but has raised global concerns. In this social context, converting solar energy into chemical energy is undoubtedly of fundamental and industrial importance. Our original interest on this topic was initially sparked by recent cutting-edge research in artificial photosynthesis. To enhance our understandings about energy issues, and meanwhile, arouse public awareness of synthetic biology, we raised multiple public questionnaires and dialogues within academe and industry. In communications with industrial community, field experts as well as administrative authority afterwards, we realized that development of a robust, sustainable and scalable approach for hydrogen production would be socially relevant, industrially important, but technically challenging. This has led us to set our ultimate goals to solve such challenge by leveraging the power of synthetic biology. We eventually proposed and demonstrated a sun-powered biofilm-interfaced artificial hydrogen-producing system, Solar Hunter. Benefiting from the real time social interactions, we kept modifying the system to be more and more adaptable to the scalable industrial application. This new system will in return, introduce a synthetic biology-based approach towards energy applications in industrial context.

Additionally, while conducting the research, our team not only kept real-time interactions with the society regarding to the project itself, but also we actively participated in a variety of educational propagation and public engagements. As the first-ever iGEM team at ShanghaiTech, this year we established the iGEM Day for Public Interests (iDPI), a special social activity for every iGEMers at ShanghaiTech. For this year’s iDPI, a Lab Open House Day was held where delegating high school students from Shanghai Coordinate International School paid a visit, aiming at arousing their interests in science, especially in synthetic biology. Moreover, we introduced the iGEM to them during the day, and are now helping them to build up their first-ever high school team for the future iGEM. Besides, this year our team closely collaborated with two iGEM teams in China, JSNU-China at Jiangsu Normal University and Tsinghua-A at Tsinghua University.

Click here to find our Integrated Human Practice.

Social Research on the Energy Issue

Background & Introduction

As previously addressed, the importance and urgency to seek a feasible solution to the energy issue is undebatable. The energy issue is neither just a regional nor national problem, but instead a global one. In response to the urgent need, vast efforts and time have already been devoted to those relevant studies, however, only few of which is really able to be put into real applications. Actually, the biggest obscure restraining the feasible solution to alleviate the energy stress is mainly due to the huge gap between the research results and the massive industrialization. In another word, not only should we emphasize the technological advancements, but also we ought to raise a strong awareness to integrate the scientific results into real industrial application to yield concrete social values.

To understand the energy issue from a border aspect, our team carried out a social research discovering the gap between the academic research and the industrial application, especially in the context of the energy issue. The main objectives of this social research aim at socially figuring out the relevant background as well as getting the project prepared for the further industrialization. We hope to hear various opinions from different aspects, or to be concrete not only the public and the academic, but also the industrial and the authority. Only when we understand comprehensively, could we figure out a series of feasible solutions in the social context, to profoundly contribute to the world.

Our social research started as early as we just decided to work on the energy issue. We built up a long-term real-time interaction with the society, instead of just a simple glimpse, for the comprehensive understanding on the issue required continuous communications and thoughts exchanging. Generally speaking, this social research consisted of two main parts, the public questionnaire and interviews. The public questionnaire was implemented to be familiar with the general public attitudes. We carefully analyzed the data collected, and according to the main concerns and opinions we found through the data analysis, we then invited several experts from different walks of life to participate in the following theme interviews. Our interviewees included scientists working at the cutting-edge in the field, industrial representatives dedicating to the energy conservation, as well as from the administrative government. With their generous engagements, our team was able to further explore the project in a social context.

Click here to know more about our social research.

Questionnaire

A questionnaire about the energy issue was designed and then distributed online. In all, 37 questions were asked, and here, we performed the core analysis on the data we collected. We had eventually collected 231 samples, 15 of which were cancelled as invalid samples due to their short answering time (less than 180 seconds). The rest of 216 samples were regarded as valid responds that qualified for further analysis.

Click here to view detailed questionnaire analysis.

Interview

To deeply understand the energy issue from various aspects as well as further develop our system in the real social context, our team conducted a series of interviews with experts from all walks of life. Besides the general voices heard from the public, we discovered the opinions from the relevant industrial communit, the academic researchers and the administrative authority.

Our interviewees include the following:

Professor Qixi Mi from School of physical science and technology at ShanghaiTech University;

Mr. Yujun Lan from Shanghai Energy Conservation Association (SECA);

Ms. Chen from Shanghai Energy Conservation Association (SECA);

Ms. Yu Huang from Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange CO., LTD;

Mr. Shengbo Chen from Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange CO., LTD;

Click here to find further information about our interviews.

Team Collaboration

This year, our team actively collaborated with two iGEM teams in China, which are the team Tsinghua-A from Tsinghua University and the JSNU-China from Jiangsu Normal University. The team Tsinghua-A focused on constructing a synthetic biology circuit to seek insights into noise propagation as well as measuring the capacity of parallel information channels. Our team members, Lechen Qian and Haolong Zhu, helped them to gain access to a better home-built computation platform, applied their knowledge to modify and operate the algorithm, and scanned two key parameters, Ka (dimer association rate) and Kd (dimer dissociation rate constant) relevant to their modeling project in use of Gillespie Algorithm. Meanwhile, we also helped JSNU-China from Jiangsu Normal University to culture a hela cell clone (the ninth generation) in our culture facility, which later on became an indivisible part in their project and gave them new thinking about utilizing new cell lines. We also benefited a lot through multiple interactions with the two teams during team collaboration.

Click here for more details about our team collaborations.

Click here to see our assistance reported by the iGEM team at Jiangsu Normal University.

Click here to see our assistance reported by the iGEM team at Tsinghua University.

ShanghaiTech iGEM Day for Public Interests (iDPI)

Aiming at spreading the iGEM as well as dedicating to various social engagements, ShanghaiTech iGEM Day for Public Interests (iDPI) was found in 2016, along with the establishment of the first ever iGEM team at ShanghaiTech University. The iDPI at ShanghaiTech is set up to encourage every iGEM team to devote themselves not only into advanced scientific researches, but also active social practices.

In the acronym name iDPI, “D” stands for dedication, “P” stands for passion, and “I” stands for inspiration. We expect that with the establishment of iDPI, every iGEMer at ShanghaiTech would bear a strong social awareness in mind, yielding profound contributions and achieving valuable social interests.

This year, the iDPI collaborated with Shanghai Coordinate International School, holding an iGEM Lab Open House Day on Zhangjiang campus.

Click here for more details about iDPI.