Team:ITB Indonesia/Public Engagement
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.
Instagram Challenge
In late August, we hosted #DrawYourGEMChallenge in Instagram that went on for about 5 weeks, with the aim to introduce awareness about Synthetic Biology to the public as an emerging field, and its potential to solve all kinds of problems with the help of Genetically Engineered Microbes, or GEMs.
#DrawYourGEMChallenge templates as new educational tools
We brought the #DrawYourGEMChallenge templates to audiences outside of social media like what we did in Synbio for Kids where we introduced the creative concept of Synthetic Biology directly to the children. Imagination is essentially the core of Synthetic Biology. A vivid and creative mind is the key to bring synthetic biology ideas come to life. The public is also encouraged to think about real world problems and how to solve them. Moreover, we are more than happy if others can use and improve our templates as educational tools for people unfamiliar with Synthetic Biology.
The challenge requires people to fill in an Instastory template and upload it with the following details:
Followed by creatively drawing their ideal GEM by choosing 1 out of these 3 templates according to the microbe they had chosen:
The challenge was held since the 20th of August until the 22nd of September, with a total submission of 15 entries, excluding the ones our own team had created, and the ones that did not meet the requirements we had set. We had hoped that the challenge could encourage the public to think of the problems in the world and how to solve them, realizing that it could be solved through the help of genetically engineered microbes that can come in the form of bacteria, virus or yeast. However, the number of entries we had received was far less than what we had initially expected. It was a shame, but also understandable since it was our first time holding an Instagram challenge. Nevertheless, we were thrilled and thankful for every person and team that had joined our challenge, whose entries are shown in the following segment:
