Team:Virtus-Parva Mexico/Parts

From 2014.igem.org



Human Practices

"You know how strongly I believe that we don't do science for ourselves, that we do it so we can explain to others..." (Niels Bohr to Heisenberg in 'Copenhagen')

For human practices we have done a variety of things, mostly dedicated to the dissemination of science within our University, locally in the city of Puebla and nationally through collaborations with other high schools

Law Initiative



During the length of our project, we found that importing chemicals reagents and biological agents that we needed were difficult to pass through customs. In coordination with other Mexican teams, specially Tec-Monterrey Team we propose to a local Deputy Patricia Leal Islas a change in customs law, to make it easier for future iGEMers and other scientists to continue with their investigations. Trough this Virtus-Parva shows as a team it's compromise to help the development of science in Mexico.

The proposal consists in the reformulation of the classification of biological agents and biomaterials, such as DNA, enzymes and bacteria. We recommended to the authority to employ experts in biology for a better and efficient process in customs

 Computer Hope


Copenhagen Play




Of course we wanted information about science to reach as far and wide as we possibly could, beyond the small talk we gave before our movie projection. Because of this, we formed an alliance with a couple of art majors and we decided to stage the play “Copenhaguen”. This play stages the visit of German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg into Copenhaguen to visit his friend, Niels Bohr; conflict arises when, after that mysterious visit, both colleagues rupture their 20 year society, and a pivoting point during the Second Great War takes place. The staging of the play was to be intertwined with informative capsules on the topics of the play.



Manuals



We also found that being the first iGEM team from our university was not an easy task, advice from a past iGEMer would have been very helpful. Other teams noticed this as well, in particular, ITESM-CEM Team. In cooperation with them, we decided to write an extensive handbook for future iGEM teams that need to consult on the mechanics of the contest and need a little push to continue teams in their own universities.

We have made 3 volumes, named : "Good Laboratory Practices: an iGEM laboratory work handbook", "The iGEM Team Handbook", "Parts Registry Handbook: A Guideline into iGEM's Standardized Parts. Click on the images below to open the desired handbook in another window.



Conferences

Computer Hope

A big part of dissemination of science is to include young adults in high school, teach them enough about science so as to peak their interest. In accordance to our goals, we decided to give a general, dynamic talk about nanotechnology, bionanotechnology and iGEM in career fairs for people close to graduation.

Computer Hope


Movie Projection

It is customary in our campus to project a film every Tuesday, run by a club called “Cineclub”. We decided to take advantage of this ongoing tradition to present a film related to synthetic biology and to give a very quick presentation on the basics of synthetic biology. This way we could get a token amount of information for people within our community and allowed them to reach out to us in case anyone wanted more information.

Computer Hope

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