Team:UFlorida/Human Practices
Human Practices
When designing our project, our Human Practices team sought out to emphasize environmental sustainability and protection.
Our initial ideas always involved working with aquatic ecosystems such as coastal areas because they play such a crucial role in Florida’s economy and lifestyle. In order to fine tune our project’s objective, we met with researchers from Florida Sea Grant, a university-based program that supports marine resource research and education. Their expertise allowed us to ensure our project stayed true to remaining environmentally-focused and helped us realise prevention is key when combating harmful algal blooms. Through further research, we discovered current methods to prevent blooms by the removal of excess phosphorus were costly and inefficient when compared to our biosensor’s model. Water treatment plants spend from $369 to $1,346 per kg on phosphorus removal through chemical precipitation. In 2018, a single bloom resulted in a $14.5 million allocation in funds for emergency clean up operations. Our method of detection would only cost between $2,000 and $7,000 for materials needed to grow our genetically modified E. coli. The preventative method we’ve developed ultimately helps keep both the inhabitants of our coastal waters and those on land safe from neurotoxins and large-scale fish kills that come with Red Tide at a fraction of the cost it takes to clean it up.
Thank you Florida Sea Grant for your insight on our project!
ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
To consolidate our project’s ethical standing, we consulted with a variety of ethics professors at the University of Florida, including Dr. Anna Peterson, Dr. Jefferey Burkhardt, and Dr. William Allen. Dr. Peterson, who specializes in environmental ethics, pointed us in the direction of a popular concept in her field known as the precautionary principle. This principle allows researchers to safely make environment decisions based on four principles: taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and increasing public participation in decision making (Kriebel et al., 2001). Per Dr. Peterson’s advice, we have taken into account each of these principles into account when formulating our project.
Kriebel, D., Tickner, J., Epstein, P., Lemons, J., Levins, R., Loechler, E. L., . . . Stoto, M. (2001). The precautionary principle in environmental science. Environmental Health Perspectives, 109(9), 871-876. doi:10.1289/ehp.01109871
Precautionary Principle of Environmental Ethics
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Taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty.
Because we are dealing with an E. Coli-based biosensor, our team has been carefully evaluating the best way to deploy our sensor without posing a risk of bacterial contamination. Our most important goal is to have a net positive impact on our local environments, so reaching out to experts like those at the Florida Sea Grant and the ethics professors has prompted us to proceed with caution, ensuring we will not cause harm in our efforts to do good. -
Shifting the burden of proof to the proponents.
To our team, shifting the burden of proof onto ourselves to provide evidence for our biosensor being a conceptually viable option for phosphorus detection has been an empowering experience. It has allowed us to gather the information we have needed in order to write our wiki and be transparent about our data. From consulting with experts to mathematically modeling our data, nearly everything we have done for our project has contributed to this principle in some way. Exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions.
Though limited in our ability to carry out these proposals in the lab, our team has considered many options for how to introduce our E. Coli biosensor into the environment safely. There is the option of extracting water from the ecosystem and then introducing our biosensor in a closed system. With this method, there is a very limited risk of contamination, but we ideally would prefer our biosensor to serve as a more permanent measure of phosphorous presence. Therefore, we have explored the idea of creating a one-way permeable membrane to enclose our biosensor, allowing us to deploy it into a waterway without allowing the E. Coli cells to leak into the ecosystem.-
Increasing public participation in decision making.
Prioritizing public outreach has been an incredibly rewarding way for us to convey our project’s importance to the public, as well as bring to light the environmental threat that HABs pose. Most notably, hosting Bite Size Science, a presentation by the Florida Sea Grant designed to explain complex scientific research in simple terms, gave us the opportunity to inform the public on the importance of protecting our Florida waterways and how our biosensor can help do this.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS
Once we got the ball moving on our project, we wanted to reach out to potential users of our biosensor. In late October, our team met with Florida Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representative Daryll Joyner to shed valuable insight into the ethical implications, potential areas of improvement, and applications of our project. Specifically, because our biosensor is integrated into E. coli., we reached out to discuss the safety and regulations currently held in the state of Florida on releasing such a biosensor into our waterways.
Mr. Joyner is a Program Administrator for the Water Quality Standards development sector of the Florida EPA. Upon discussion with him, we learned that E. coli is an indicator organism for human waste. Therefore, we decided to put our biosensor in a capsule like membrane in order to 1. not interfere with EPA E. coli readings and 2. not add an unsafe organism to Florida waterways. Since our biosensor would be in a membrane, it can be removed from the environment via a buoy and tracked via a GPS.
Mr. Joyner was delighted to hear that our biosensor would be able to detect phosphorus levels over a period of time rather than at isolated quarterly intervals as is currently used. Our biosensor also would provide the Florida EPA and other environmental agencies high density data which could potentially change the way they currently interpret phosphorus data.
Lastly, Mr. Joyner brought up a great point that different bodies of water in Florida have varying phosphorus thresholds. He pointed us in the direction of the water quality standards that are in effect for Clean Water Act purposes, particularly section: 16-302.531. Listed below are the current thresholds set forth by the Clean Water Act in different regions of Florida. In future application of our project, these threshold values should be taken into consideration when indicating whether or not a region has high phosphorus levels.
Table taken from the EPA Water Quality Standard as proposed by the Clean Water Act
Integrated Human Practices
Our Human Practices team worked tirelessly to ensure our project plan, design, and ethical framework were sound, consulting with a variety of seasoned experts to shape dry lab’s path for modeling our biosensor.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND OUTREACH:
In the early stages of our project, we met with several experts from the Florida Sea Grant, including Dr. Sherry Larkin (environmental economist and president of the North American Association of Fisheries Economics), Dr. Dail Laughinghouse (phycologist), Laura Reynolds, and Ashley Smyth (both coastal health researchers). They provided us with information that greatly shaped the course of our project, most notably by informing us that nitrogen tends to be the source of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in marine ecosystems, while phosphorus contributes more to the freshwater blooms. Using this information, we were able to target our biosensor to be used primarily in freshwater environments, ecosystems like the Florida riverways and the Everglades that are renowned worldwide for their beauty and biodiversity. They also informed us that, while aquatic nitrate detection technology is already available, the current technology for detecting phosphorus in aquatic ecosystems is expensive and impractical, further solidifying our motivations for working with phosphorus.
After speaking with several professionals from the Florida Sea Grant Project, UF iGEM had the pleasure of presenting to an outreach program established by the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences called “Bite-sized Science” on July 28th, 2020. Our Human Practices team compiled a comprehensive introduction to our project, the environmental impact behind it, and the crucial ethical considerations.
Generally presented by researchers with PhDs, Team Florida was ecstatic to have the chance to describe the importance of our project to those attending the session, ranging from high school students to researchers working with the Florida Sea Grant. Our presentation detailed out what our tool measures, how it measures it, and how this can impact research and public policy, ecology, and environmental economics in the state of Florida.
After the presentation, UF iGEM was thrilled to discover that our main audience was a great deal of professionals involved in Florida Sea Grant. There were approximately 34 attendees, and in a post-presentation survey, 75% of attendees reported to have learned a lot during the presentation. This experience has not only allowed us to conduct valuable outreach and education for the public, despite a pandemic, but it has also provided us with crucial professional connections to guide us in our future endeavors.
This outreach project helped tie together why our project holds importance for Florida’s community in both an environmental context and socio-economic context, and that we were successful in having this message understood by our viewers. Bite Size Science gave Team Florida the opportunity to express why our research is important, both to other scientists and the general public, solidifying our passion for our project and reinvigorating our Team’s morale during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the Bite-Sized Science presentation was an effective way for our team to share the concept of iGEM and the details of our project beyond our local community.
LANGUAGE ACCESSIBILITY:
Since iGEM is an international research competition, our team sought out to make our wiki accessible. University of Florida ethics professor, Dr Burkhardt, brought up how as researchers, we are responsible for communicating the results of our work to the rest of the world - we must “sell” our product. In order to do so, Florida reached out to a multitude of language professors at the University of Florida to translate our project summary. We hope that by providing a project description in people’s native language that they will have a better understanding of our project and decide whether to inquire more. The translations can be found on the “Home page”.