Team:GO Paris-Saclay/HP/iGame
A philosophical inspiration
In French the word “expérience” both means “experience” and “experiment". If we look at the different meanings of this word and think about it, we can say that, we, biologists, are continuously experimenting. We experience/experiment life as people and we make experiments in the lab. As iGEMers, we wanted to address the following questions: Can synthetic biology results inspire our way of seeing life, i.e. our life philosophy? Can our own life experiences influence the way we look at synthetic biology experimental results? For every experiment we did, using our nucleases, we addressed one question about the meaning of emptiness. We thus proposed three different answers, in relation with a philosopher, in form of Haikus to underline the ephemeral of life. This game aims to provoke thoughts about all the questions surrounding a DNA-free cell. Please try it too. Just click on an answer and discover which philosopher your thought is most associated with !
We thank all scientists and non-scientists (>50) who participated to our iGAME! This helps us to gain knowledge about the way the fate of a DNA-free cell can inspire common emotions. The results are presented (and freely interpreted below each set of haikus).
The winning poem (ca. 45 %) is the first one. The other two poems were almost equally chosen (26% for #2, 29 % for #3).
“Above emptiness Life still gives breath to the cells And breaks the darkness” We feel like this poem may reflect some form of positivity and joy of living. No matter how long there is life, there is hope. This thought will make us stronger.
The winning poem (ca. 43 %) is the third one. The other two poems were almost equally chosen (27.5% for #1, 29.5% for #2).
“Emptiness my friend Come closer and take your place Still it’s not the end” This choice may reflect some form of positivity, hope and perhaps courage in the face of emptiness. We propose to bring this poem closer to a thought of Epicureanism. Indeed Epicurus considered that “The art of living well and the art of dying well are one”.
The winning poem (49 %) is the second one. The other two poems were almost equally chosen (27.5% for #1, 23.5% for #3).
“No… It’s still breathing! If life makes fun of void Tell me, what’s living?” It seems that this result may surprise us and lead us to reconsider what life is all about. Being able to always wonder about questions and remain Cartesian, a great motto!
The winning poem (45 %) is the third one. The first and second poems were chosen in 18 % and 37 % of the cases, respectively.
“Where am I going? Riddle… But willing to bet Now, to lose nothing!” It seems that most of us are willing to bet on the most positive solution. As proposed by Blaise Pascal, “Let us estimate these two cases: if you win, you win everything, if you lose, you lose nothing”.
The winning poem (48 %) is the second one. The other two poems were equally chosen (26%).
“Life, so marvelous Just you abscond, already You’re back. Prodigious!” Confucius said that “Joy is in everything, beauty too, you have to know how to extract them”. What a beauty to see an ephemeral RNA cell!
