Team:Florida/Human Practices
Human Practices
Dr. Thomas Kirkoff
Our iGEM team was lucky to have Dr. Thomas Kirkoff take a look at our project and give us his ethical input. As an ethics professor at the University of Florida and clinical ethicist at UF Health Shands Hospital, he has seen the benefits and disadvantages of synthetic biology in practice. Kirkhoff said the benefits of our project outweigh the potential concerns, and he sees our project making a lastly impact in the scientific world. His only concern was with the safety of our project, so he suggested that we complete the National Institute of Health Research tutorial.
Dr. Lorenzo Rossi
Dr. Lorenzo Rossi is an environmental root biologist at the University of Florida. He talked to us about potential applications about our project and his concerns about it. We learned that heavy metals are a much bigger issue in Asian countries compared to the US. Heavy metal pollution can occur from a lot of sources such as faulty piping, gasoline, batteries and more. In terms of our project, having a way to show evidence of heavy metal pollution is a unique idea, and ultimately being able to screen for it using CRISPR is a unique twist to the recorder aspect of the project. Of course, the idea of genetically engineered organisms was not left untouched. He expressed the fact that we do not know the long term effects of released these organisms, and advised us to look into what goes into protecting the environment by consulting the EPA.
Integrated Human Practices
Dr.Denise Adams
Denise Adams is a professor of Disabilities in Society here at the University of Florida; we sat down with her to discuss the main goal of our human practices team this year: making our Wiki accessible. After describing the color scheme, format, and content of our Wiki, Adams had a lot of great advice for us. Originally we had an array of pastel colors on our home page (see below), but she instructed us that people who are visually impaired need colors with high contrast, so pastels would not work. We took her advice by removing the pastels and simplifying our palette.
The thing that stuck with us the most about Adams was her advice on language style of our publication. She told us that most individuals only have the capacity for 7 minutes of uninterrupted concentration, and that they read at a 5th grade reading level. Turning our project into a 5th grade reading level is very difficult, but it probed us to inquire why people get turned off from reading articles in the first place and how we can capture that full 7 minutes of attention. Per Adams’ advice, we looked into truncating our information to make it more digestible. The concepts we discuss are very dense, so it seems impossible to simplify them into easily digestible topics.
We initially thought of writing short summary paragraphs at the end of our page in a lower reading level to address this issue, but Adams challenged us to do more as this would cause unnecessary scrolling. We asked Dr.Adams what she thought about "hover text" and she really liked the idea! Hover text is one way that we are making our wiki more accessible. We did this by using tooltips for complicated words that the general public may be unfamiliar with. Don't know what a tooltip is? Hover your mouse over the word "plasmid" below and a box explaining it will pop up. Thanks to Dr.Adams' advice, we incorporated this hover text into all parts of our wiki where we felt it was difficult to comprehend the text. For any team that would like the code for our hover text, we have copied it below!
Science For Life Seminar
Once we had collected all of our data and begun writing our Wiki page, Dr. Adam’s advice on making the website a lower reading level kept ringing in our ears. How can we make these findings more accessible to people who want to learn more about it? Keeping the average reading level in mind (courtesy of Dr. Adams), we set out to find out what else holds people back from diving into research articles.
Our UFlorida team was invited to present at the University of Florida’s “Science for Life” class; this class is specifically for students who are interested in research, and have a vast interest in different scientific topics. After presenting our research, we had the students fill out a survey about the name of a scientific article, if they were interested, and if the complexity of the article turned them off from reading it.
The results? Out of ~90 students, about 75% of the students stated that the complexity of the article made them lose interest in it. Taking that new found knowledge into account, we reviewed our Wiki and tried to make the diction more common and understandable. While genetic engineering is a dense topic, it is important to still cater our research to everyone in society- not just people with extensive knowledge in it.
