Human Practices
Silver human practices
Since our project is very fundamental with no short term applications outside of a lab, the societal and ethical implications of our project were unclear at first. Prof. Anna Deplzaes whom we’ve met initially to talk about the ethics of our project admitted that it’s still at such an early stage and since we “only” want to modify a bacteria there are no ethical or societal concerns with what we are doing, except maybe the more philosophical question as to whether it is ethical to change and also recreate life.
We decided not to pursue this interesting but not so practical philosophical question, as this is not the point of human practices.
Instead we took another look at the definition of human practices:
On the main page it says to consider whether your project is responsible and “conducted with care and foresight.'' We decided to focus on this definition throughout our silver and gold human practices.
By reading through many past iGEM wikis and talking to iGEM alumnis we came to understand the importance of thinking ahead. Some things may work for your group in that specific lab and you might be comfortable with how you do your research, but if you make an application it needs to work for everyone, not just yourself or your team.
The next question for us was; for whom are we doing our project and how can we make it easy to use for them? - To consider this question, is foresight.
We identified two target groups of our project. First, researchers in Life Sciences and second, students. Whether it’s University students, iGEMers or even high-school students, we would need to make our parts user friendly for students to experiment, research and create new applications with our parts.
There are many aspects that could be addressed when taking this approach, however, we think that there is one central one: Safety.
The first concern when working in a lab with organisms should be safety. This is especially important for students. Our goal was that our system can be worked with in a BSL 1 lab.
To ensure this, we met with Dr. Silvio Hemmi, who is the safety officer of the Institute of Molecular Life Sciences where our lab is located.
For our project we try to replicate the natural interaction between certain phages and pseudomonas bacteria. There are five phage-bacteria pairs known where, upon infection of the bacteria, the phage envelops its DNA into a protein cage to protect it from the bacterial defense system.
Some of the Pseudomonas belong in the risk group 2 category, f.e P. aeruginosa.
Through our meeting with Dr. Hemmi we determined that Lab-coats, gloves, eye protection and regularly cleaning and disinfecting the workbenches should be sufficient safety measures when working with our organisms or derivatives thereof.
This was the start of our silver human practices. The second part was not planned at first, which made it even better.
When we did outreach at local high-schools to talk about our project, a teacher approached us with two students that were very interested in doing their “maturaarbeit” with the topic of genetic engineering. The maturaarbeit is a sort of bachelor thesis but for high-schoolers that they must complete to graduate.
We saw this could be the perfect opportunity for us to continue our human practices.
We offered that they join us to do a part of our project with us for a week. We would be able to see how quickly they could understand the theory behind our project and the experiments we were doing.
Marton and Stephanie are two very motivated and dedicated students at the KZU in Zurich. They were very interested and invested in the theory and research behind the phage-bacteria interaction and picked up on it very quickly.
This was also true for the experiments.
After giving them a proper safety introduction to the lab and equipping them with their personal safety gear. We performed an amplification step and subsequent cloning of gene gp204 with stefanie, including the imaging.
With marton we went through the amplification and subsequent cloning of gp204 into our His-tag vector for protein purification including the Ni-column affinity purification step with subsequent imaging.
A week before they joined us in the lab we brought them up to speed with the fundamentals of our project and surprisingly they were quick in understanding the basics and were interested in a lot of details that we were pondering about.
During the lab-week, we supervised them conducting their experiments and it was great to see that at the end of the week they were getting more independent and needed less assistance from our side.