We ask every team to think deeply and creatively about whether their project is responsible and good for the world. Consider how the world affects your work and how your work affects the world.
Explain how you have determined your work is responsible and good for the world.
Visit the Medals page for more information.
How does your project affect society and how does society influence the direction of your project? How might ethical considerations and stakeholder input guide your project purpose, design and the experiments you conduct in the lab? How did this feedback enter into the process of your work throughout the iGEM Competition? Document a thoughtful and creative approach to exploring these questions and how your project evolved in the process, to compete for this award.
Visit the Special Prizes page for more information.
At iGEM, Human Practices is about more than just outreach. It's about actively considering the societal implications of your synthetic biology project and demonstrating how those considerations have shaped your work. This page documents our team's Human Practices activities and their impact on our project.
For more information, visit the Human Practices Hub.
We volunteered with Berättarministeriet as part of their Forskningsresan initiative – a science lab experience for children in grades 4–6, hosted at Stockholm University.
The program focused on biology and offered a variety of experiments and the opportunity for the children to ask all their questions.
The children isolated DNA from bananas, created their own fantasy molecules, and explored biological samples, such as nerve cells or their own isolated banana DNA, using both light and fluorescence microscopy.
They also conducted experiments involving fluorescence of proteins or chlorophyll and electricity conductivity.
Each day, one of us was present to support the children with the experiments and to answer their many questions about science. Their curiosity led to both fun and thought-provoking discussions. They shared creative ideas ranging from having a robot to help with homework to exploring the mechanisms of disorders, such as ADHD and PTSD. It was not only about what future research we could do, but also about the kinds of science they might explore themselves someday.