Human Practices

Cornell iGEM Human Practices came into the year with much potential and uncertainty: despite our passion for the fields, we were largely new to the field of synthetic biology and environmental engineering, let alone iGEM. Over the course of the past spring, summer, and fall we grew to become intellectually familiar and developed significant personal and academic investments in the subjects our team was tackling as a whole.

We set out to create Human Practices components that (1) contributed and congealed with the work our team was undertaking, (2) had meaningful impact on our local and global communities, and (3) was innovative, novel, and educational to future teams. As such, we: engaged in extensive outreach; learned about the environmental, social, economic, and political issues that shaped the world of the biochemistry we were tackling; launched a new social media platform called Humans & SynBio in collaboration with teams from across the world; put together a survey to understand the constructs underlying opinions about synthetic biology; built a Comprehensive Environmental Assessment, following up on our efforts from previous years; facilitated collaborations within our university to put together a portfolio of possible implementation of our genetically engineered technologies; reached out to iGEM teams to collect water samples for testing; and considered the bioethical and safety implications of our work writ large.

Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia.

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness.

Humans and SynBio

This year we aimed to include an HPrac component that had global impact, was modular and adaptable, and that served to educate both iGEM teams and the communities in which they operate, enhancing their relationship with each other. To this end we took inspiration from the popular photoblog Humans of New York, which chronicles the personalities, visages, and life experiences of the people of the streets, subways, and salons of New York City. HONY, as it’s called, has achieved a worldwide following and has spawned numerous spin-off projects, including Humans of Ithaca and Humans of Cornell University. We sought to emulate HONY’s singular style, a mode of social media posting that is informative, striking, and familiar: every picture includes as its point of focus a person or group of people, and is accompanied by a quote from their conversation with the photographer, a piece of text that often highlights some unique quality of the interviewees. To create our project, we built a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/HumansandSynBio. We produced a document (at http://tinyurl.com/HaSBInvite) that invited iGEM teams from across the world to contribute posts. This invitation outlines interview protocols, instructions for obtaining permission to post an interview transcript and photo online, and how the project relates to the broader goals shared by the iGEM competition and its constituent teams. After e-mailing this to all teams whose e-mails were readily available, as well as posting our invitation on the iGEM Facebook group several times this summer, results started to flow in. The submissions weren’t the only memorable element of this outreach - we learned a great deal about how individuals around the world think about and relate to synthetic biology. We continue to actively solicit and accept submissions for Humans & Synbio. Please contact us through Facebook if you are interested in participating!

No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee.

Header 3

The quick, brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog. Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps. Bawds jog, flick quartz, ex nymphs. Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex! Fox nymphs grab quick-jived waltz. Brick quiz whangs jumpy veldt fox. Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack.

References

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