Team:ITB Indonesia/Open Discussion
Student's Open Discussion
Student Body Executive of ITB
Background: As a project that will give rise to a disruptive technology, it might bring negative impact directly to the society and even environment if executed irresponsibly.
Goals: In that regard, we need to gather all concerns that might emerge because of our technology in socio-economical and ecological context. This open discussion invites ITB's Microbiology Student Association, Biology Student Association, Post-Harvest Technology Student Association, and generally all interested student of ITB.
From their perspective, we must take into account upscaling issue, economical issue, environmental issue, and regulation issue. Upscaling of the technology mainly the bacteria production must consider the biosafety of the facility and must be cost efficient so it can achieve lowest manufacturing cost. That issue also connected to economical issue, the product price must be cheap enough so moderate shrimp farmers can afford to buy it. This issue drives us to develop our own device because comercial spectrophotometer in the market are too expensive for Indonesian shrimp farmers. As for environmental and regulation issue, currently Indonesian law do not permitting any dispersal or application of genetically engineered microbes to the environment in any ways. Those kind of microbes are worried to disrupt ecological balance, spread unwanted traits to another microbes such as antibiotic resistance, or even becoming pathogen for humans. These concerns lead us to think thoroughly about the safety of our device and technology, so we developed an engineering control to our device and its standard operational procedure.
