Team:UNILausanne/Human Practices
Human Practices Overview
Gender Equality in STEM
Gender inequality is a problem in scientific fields and Switzerland is no exception. To address this problem, we decided to create an awareness video on gender inequality with the help of members of the Commission for the Promotion of Women of the University of Lausanne (UNIL). This video was shot in the form of an interview and highlights the personal experiences of men and women scientists. It shows that, even in 2020 and in the field that most advocates objectivity, equality is still not achieved. We also discussed with Marie Pasquier, head of mission at the UNIL Equality Office, about the measures implemented in our university. She made us understand that gender issues are complex and involve a multitude of factors that need to be addressed at several academic levels at the same time.
For more details see Women in STEM
GMO Survey
Agricultural GMO have a bad reputation in Switzerland and a moratorium on the use of agricultural GMO has been emplaced since 2013. We wanted to know if this mistrust towards agricultural GMO could have an impact on medical GMO and so in our project. Thus, we set up a survey, distributed it via social networks and collected 244 replies from different age groups and backgrounds. Results show that the mistrust towards agricultural GMO doesn’t have impact on medical GMO perception and that the participants agree with the use of medical GMO to treat themselves. Moreover, environmental and health issues are of greatest concern regarding the use of medical GMO. This had had a significant impact on our project since it pushed us to develop a biosafety system, our kill switch, to avoid health and ecological problems.
For more details see GMO Survey
Science Communication & Education
Most scientific papers and science communication media are mainly written in English without any available translation to other languages. This can be a problem for people who are not fluent in this language, limiting the reach of the information as a consequence. In collaboration with the Chalmers-Gothenburg team, we made a multilingual science communication blog, translated to over 8 languages (English, French, Swedish, Spanish, Japanese, Brazilian-Portugese, Italian and Polish). We also published 3 guest posts from other iGEM teams. We posted once a week, writing about subjects like synthetic biology, genetic circuits, cancer or the immune system, while trying to make scientific subjects more approachable to people without scientific backgrounds. We also aimed to tackle subjects beyond the “scientific bench” so we wrote about outstanding women in science or still controversial topics like GMOs, both subjects which were also explored in our Human Practices. Our readers have a possibility to comment and engage in a discussion about each text!
For more details see Science Communication & Education
Inclusion
This year, a really important conversation that has been has is the one around inclusion. Being a Swiss team composed mostly, from people from outside of Switzerland this is a subject that hit really close to home. That is why we decided to create two sub-projects around this issue. First off, we collaborated with Chalmers-Gothenburg iGEM team to create a science blog called The Transcriptome, which has been translated to over 8 languages, trying the reach the broadest audience possible.
We also organized some interviews with people in different stages of their career (master students, post-docs, professors) in the STEM field to raise awareness on the underrepresentation of women in STEM. We tried to get some insight on their past experiences in their career paths, to see if there were some difficulties that arose because of their gender.
For more details see Inclusion
Integrated Human Practices
BioSafety
We took into account public's concerns obtained through a survey on the topic of GMO as well as some comments made on the topic of containment by the OhioState iGEM Team to decide to create a kill switch mechanism for our project. We also received some feedback from an expert on how to improve. Finally we researched the legal requirements on biosafety for our project to be able to be released in the market.
Women in Scientific Data
We also dived into an issue that has existed for a long time in research: the problem of gender disparities in scientific data. We first looked into the history and then we scrutinized how we could try to eliminate this bias in our project. W decided to do so by modeling how to adapt our system to the circadian cycle of each gender. We also conducted interviews on the topic of gender equality to try to understand why this problem still exists today.
For more details see Integrated Human Practices
