Team:SASTRA Thanjavur/Human Practices
HUMAN PRACTICES
The House of Toeholds owes its construction to the various interesting (we hope!) and diverse sessions we hosted during our iGEM 2019 journey. We hosted our first Human Practices session, which was indeed a memorable one for all of us, at D. A. V. Public School, Chennai. We organized our signature event SynBio Auction there and it went on for nearly 5 hours, elevating our ecstasy levels and boosting us with confidence for our upcoming sessions on spreading the fact that Synthetic Biology is fun!
In the month of June, especially the fourth week, we were on a Human Practices session spree with a couple of school visits at Shri Natesan Vidyasala Matriculation School, Chennai and Chettinad Vidyashram, Chennai followed by a couple of NGO visits at two branches of International Foundation for Crime Prevention and Victim Care (PCVC), Chennai. We emulated the DAV formula for the sessions at our subsequent school visits. For the NGO sessions, the objective was to create awareness about cervical cancer, its pathophysiology, its disease burden in India, the available diagnostic methods for its detection, the merits and demerits associated with each of those methods and finally the essentiality of our iGEM project. At the end of the session, we collected data from the participants with their consent, on the awareness that they had about cervical cancer and the Pap smear test, predominantly. We had a similar session at the Repco Microfinance Self Help Group Center, Trichy in the month of July wherein our audience was women from the rural areas surrounding the district of Trichy in Tamil Nadu, predominantly from the cervical cancer hotspot districts of Perambalur and Ariyalur. Here, we employed the same modus operandi that we took up at the NGO sessions in Chennai.
In order to expand the horizons of assessing and gauging the awareness about cervical cancer and Pap smear test especially, we took up an online survey for which we received responses from 223 people, across the world. The information from the written forms and online survey were analyzed and interpreted to evaluate the necessity of our project and are documented extensively in our Silver Human Practices page.
Since we are working on a project under the esoteric field of synthetic biology, we wished to induce and disseminate the interests that we collated while working in such a field, to our fellow students in our University. In addition, we also wanted to furnish the students with information on the voluminous opportunities and career openings possible and available in Synthetic Biology. Hence, with these two broad objectives in mind, we launched a Synthetic Biology club under the aegis of School of Chemical and Biotechnology, where we hosted weekly sessions to endeavour the purpose of the club. We also motivated the student members of the club to take part in subsequent iGEM editions and write project proposals to various funding agencies that fund for such synthetic biology projects such as iBEC, NBEC, to name a few.
Since our project is aimed at creating a patient friendly and early stage detection mechanism for cervical cancer, which would give women around the world a stronger fighting chance against this disease, we consulted oncologists to obtain appropriate insights to set our project motivation right. On this note, we met a couple of oncologists in Chennai. Dr. J.S. Malliga, Head-In charge, Preventive Oncology Department, Cancer Institute (W.I.A), Adyar, Chennai apprised us of the prevalence of cervical cancer and the social stigma against the invasive Pap smear test and Dr. M.A. Raja, an accredited oncologist from Apollo Cancer Institute, Chennai extensively briefed us about the progression of cervical cancer and the available methods of screening. We also got the golden opportunity to meet Mr. Ramadorai S., former adviser to the Prime Minister of India in the National Council on Skill Development and presently the Chairman of Tata Technologies for obtaining his immensely valuable suggestions on the software front and extrapolation of our project to a real-time diagnostic device. We further spoke to several women from nearby villages belonging to non-governmental organizations and self help groups to understand their aversion to the Pap smear test. We conducted a written as well as an online survey to gauge the willingness of women to accept our project as a non-invasive alternative to the Pap smear test.
SynBio Auction, Primers and Project video were the different activities that are team took up during our iGEM journey this year. SynBio Auction was our signature activity, which was designed keeping in mind the fervid atmosphere that an auction could create in the minds of high school students. The SynBio Auction Handbook A.K.A. the bible of the auction was designed with special love for the school students while Primers was a collaboration idea, which was aimed at delineating the basics of synthetic biology to a non-iGEMer or even a non-biologist. The magazine contains articles, interview transcripts with field experts, photographs, artwork, protocol demystification, basically anything and everything related to SynBio. We also created a video describing our project and the motivation behind it in simple terms to put it across to all kinds of people and create awareness about cervical cancer and its impact on women.