Team:Edinburgh/HumanPractices/Values/Project

OUR VALUES

Discover our values! Select a category

TEAM

The team's shared values

PROJECT

The values adopted in making the biosensor platform

BIOSENSOR

The values adopted for our case study

PROJECT

Hi reader! Here you can find more about the values and principles that shaped our iGEM experience and project.
Specifically, we want to celebrate and share the values that we adopted as people and as scientists

Responsibility

Science could be intentionally or uninteniontallly misused.
Before guaranteeing potential benefits of our project we had to prove that the overall benefits were outweighing potential risks.
Therefore during our Human Practices, we initially approached responsibility with sessions of scenario creation (Blue Skies Research) over the potential misusage of our Biosensor Platform as well as identifying feasible countermeasures

We tried to avoid our won personal biases and we made sure to interview a wide range of stakeholder that were quite heterogeneous in terms of gender, ethnicity, nationality and expertise.

Even if moreover following RRI standards and different frameworks such as IRCG and PAGIT proved to be useful to broaden our views on what could be considered responsible on an organisational and individual level.

During our project we identified possible misusage and areas of intervention

Safety

As highlighted by the Safety pages on our website we considered Safety as a multifaceted concept
As citizens and scientists we followed the regulations and the guidelines of local and national authorities while developing the bio-platform. That also meant having a project built entirely through remote virtual interactions due to the unprecedented COVID19 circumstances since our University imposed a strict policy in terms of lab access.
Apart from COVID regulations we adopted safety as one of our core values. We tried to minimize any potential design risk by constantly revising our models and stripping back unnecessarily components.

Sustainability

Science could be intentionally or unintentionally misused.
Before guaranteeing potential benefits of our project we had to prove that the overall benefits were outweighing potential risks.
Therefore during our Human Practices, we initially approached responsibility with sessions of scenario creation (Blue Skies Research) over the potential misuse of our Biosensor Platform as well as identifying feasible countermeasures

We tried to avoid our won personal biases and we made sure to interview a wide range of stakeholder that were quite heterogeneous in terms of gender, ethnicity, nationality and expertise.

Even if moreover following RRI standards and different frameworks such as IRCG and PAGIT proved to be useful to broaden our views on what could be considered responsible on an organisational and individual level.

During our project we identified possible misuse and areas of intervention

Inclusivity

This year our team was very peculiar in terms of student participation and team composition. Since the start of the project two different demographic groups, the first composed by the students born or raised in Europe the second made by international students from East-Asia, namely, China. Another notable characteristic of our team the ratio between female and male participants with female participation being higher for most of the project.
While diversity is a product of chance, inclusiveness is a choice. Obviously at the first stages of any project inclusiveness doesn't come automatically since participants don't know each other but luckily with a lot of patience and a "... thousand of virtual meetings later..." we understand each other quite well and while it is the impossible to fully understand one's unique background and character everyone is comfortable in expressing their opinion and receive feedback in a non-judgemental way
Regarding Human Practices and Inclusiveness, given the two major demographic groups when confronted with some social, economical and technical issues, we often sought opinions of experts that represented demographic groups distant from ours

Ethicality

Even if we didn't officially consult an independent multidisciplinary and pluralist ethics committees, the team-members often sought guidance to professors at the University's School of Social and Political Science.
All data collection was carried out under the conditions of fully informed consent. Before collecting the surveys and conducting the interviews formal consent in written form was asked from the participants. Moreover, before each activity researcher explained the scope of the research activities and the voluntary nature of the activities either in written or oral form, guaranteed anonymity and gave the chance to the participant to ask questions back either in written or oral form.
As the use of one's image for promotional material(e.g. photos and videos), each team member filled the appropriate consent form

Morality

Having a project driven by morals implies taking a stand, being proactive and stay on the lookout for things that could happen. Obviously opinions could be flawed and there are no problems in taking a more conservative approach and stick to ethics but this year we decided to be a little bit bold and take some to strike a blow to conventions that have not been questioned in the iGEM community.
For instance we and other teams felt that the iGEM fees are a huge burden that could hinder participation and inclusiveness.Many people make some comments but there is no public discussion... Why? We think this year is a good moment to discuss such issues especially since the "virtual" jamboree participation amounted for 2500USD. On what precisely the iGEM foundation spent the money on? and how they want to invest the remaining money?