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• Policy & Practice
  • Question
  • Our Policy
  • Discussion
  • What We Do
  • Evaluate

Policy & Practice

Question

This year we, iGEM Kyoto, consider about one important question. The question is funding. In order to do iGEM activity, we need much money. For example, we need money to register the team and the member, to buy reagents and to fly. It is also said to the general research. And due to this problem, we have to limit what we do during the summer vacation.

Our Policy

Firstly, we discussed about this problem in our team. Our usual budget is 800thousand yen. Almost of it is paid by team member. Each member pay about 40,000yen on average. It is hard for us to get such money, and we do part time job in order to earn it. Consider about this situation, we decide two policies.

1. Go to the company which related to the chemistry and biology.

2. Make the educational pamphlet and get the advertising expenses.

Discussion

Secondly, we decided to go to the expert and discuss about this problem. In Kyoto University, there are interesting division. That is called “Center for the Promotion of Interdisciplinary Education and Research”, called C-PIER. This center is trying to connect one laboratory to another, and to the corporation. We try to talk with them, and can meet Dr. Miyano who is in this center. He gave us some advices. The first one is the new way to get the money. That is cloud funding. Many cloud funding is not mainly for scientific project. However academist ( https://academist-cf.com/ ) is specialized in getting the research funds. The process is very simple. Decide the research theme, make the site and video which is about our project, arrange the return gift, and wait until the people contribute the money. Second one is the activity to get money from the general public. One of the idea is the fund-raising activities at the gate of Kyoto University.

After discussing this problem, we think there are some possibility to get the money from general public. However today we can’t get enough donation. Of course the main reason is that they don’t know much about iGEM. And Through our previous human activity, the lack of knowledge about synthetic biology is also the reason why general public do not donate us. Then we try to do the enlightening activity. Moreover we hope iGEM activity and synthetic biology will be more developed, we decided to go to the high school and teach them what iGEM and synthetic biology is. The contents are about biology, iGEM, iGEM Kyoto and the book we recommend to know biology.

Fig

1. Go to the company which related to the chemistry and biology.

2. Make the educational pamphlet and make iGEM and synthetic biology famous.

What We do

The result is below.

1. Go to the company which related to the chemistry and biology.
We e-mailed about 50 company and get 10.000yen.
We created the pamphlet to explain our activity.

2.Make the educational pamphlet and make iGEM and synthetic biology famous.
(After making the pamphlet, we take it to the high school. And hand them out.)

Evaluate

Through this project, we evaluated about this year's project.

	1. Go to the company which related to the chemistry and biology.	2. Make the educational pamphlet and make iGEM and synthetic biology famous.
O whether it allowed you to answer your question	X It is not enough to raise the money only by this way.	O The result has not been come out the result.
O how it influenced the team's scientific project	We get donation not by money, but by reagents. It allows us to do experiments smoothly.	We can have a new understanding of iGEM and synthetic biology.
O how it might be adapted for others to use (within and beyond iGEM)	It is very hard to contact with company, but we cannot get sufficient result.	The pamphlet can be used to educate other people.