Human Practices is about how your work affects the world and how the world affects your work.

Hi, I'm Megan Palmer. I'm the chair of iGEM's Human Practices committee. This video is to get you oriented to what human practices means at iGEM. It covers the why, what and how of human practices. Why is Human Practices an important part of iGEM? What do we expect from teams? And how can you get started? This video itself is just to get you started.

You can find much more information on the iGEM Human Practices Hub and if you have questions or ideas about Human Practices, feel free to email me and the rest of the committee at executivehp@igem.org

So let's get started.

First, why is Human Practices an important part of iGEM?

Human Practices is about how your work affects the world and how the world affects your work.

What I love about iGEM is that teams don't just do great technical work in the lab.

Through their human practices efforts iGEM teams engage with the world their projects exist within; exploring aspects of their project that involve issues such as ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety security and more.

These issues are complex and often don’t have simple answers.

This means teams engage with the communities who might be impacted by their work; to invite them to help shape the course of research. We at iGEM believe that these societal considerations should be upfront and integrated with the design and execution of synthetic biology projects, which is part of being a good engineer and designing a thoughtful biological engineering project.

This leads us to our next question. What do we expect from teams?

As in other parts of iGEM, we expect excellent and inspiring work on topics in Human Practices, we also expect and challenge you to come up with new and creative approaches that we may not have thought of before.

To get an idea of what we might like to see, you should review the medal criteria and the award descriptions on the iGEM website. To qualify for a silver medal, you must convince us that you have thought creatively and carefully about whether your project is safe, responsible and good for the world.

One way to qualify for a Gold Medal is to expand on this work and show us how you have taken lessons from engaging with Human Practices issues and reflected them in the design and execution of your project. We award a special prize for Best Integrated Human Practices to recognize excellence in this Gold Medal work. We also award a special prize for the Best Education and Public Engagement efforts for outstanding work that goes above and beyond making changes in the project design and execution.

You can read more about these awards and criteria on the Human Practices Hub.

So last, how can you get started?

The first thing you can do is to check the tips for teams that we have listed on the Human Practices Hub. These are simple things to keep in mind, like finding mentors and thinking about how you can build on previous work and help others to adapt your approach. The second thing you can do is check out the resources on the Human Practices Hub. These include tools that have been specifically developed to help iGEM teams think about their Human Practices work and links to people and organisations you can contact to learn more. The third thing you can do is look at what other teams have done in the past. For example, teams have conducted analyses of the environmental impact of their project, written guides on ownership and intellectual property, facilitated biosafety and biosecurity investigations, created museum exhibits and even done street theatre. Through this work teams have engaged with diverse communities to shape the practice of synthetic biology across local and global scales. They have consulted and shared their experiences with citizens and policy makers in their own cities and countries as well as international forums such as the United Nations.

We’ve highlighted a few examples on the Human Practices Hub that impressed us but you can find many more inspiring examples on previous years’ teams’ iGEM wiki pages. Again, we'd love to see you try something that has never been done before.

Finally, if you have any questions or ideas about Human Practices that you'd like to share, please reach out to us. My favourite part of working with iGEM is being inspired by your visions of synthetic biology as a Human Practice. We wish you the best of luck with your projects.