Our reflections

This essay is the third of four pillars towards a better understanding of complexity. It brings elements from the survey, from the interviews, the outreach and from further reading together. Here, we reflect on how our project and science, in general, relate to these topics.

Our human practice project was guided by the following questions:

“How do people experience complexity? Which approaches do exist to approach complexity? How does complexity arise? Should people, scientists in particular, consider that subparts of a complex entity are mixed in a both ordered and unorganized way, and accept uncertainty? If yes, how can the uncertainty be taken into account? Or are simple parts strictly ordered, and complexity arises when these simple parts follow rules?”

This questions splits up into two approaches. The first approach is needed to take into account uncertainty of intrinsic complexity of the parts we consider as of the environment. The second approach is necessary to understand the parts better in order to be able to predict results.

On our way of answering the questions coming along with complexity we focused on four different components: Listening, discussing, sharing and thinking.

The first component of listening was covered by a survey regarding complexity and its emergence. We listened to the public and learned about the existing ideas of complexity and how people relate to it. Something that we have observed is a trend of increasing complexity when going from non-living objects to living beings. A feature of living beings might be that they have emerging properties. This is what we experience as complex. 70% of the participants of our survey have shown an interest to simplify and try to understand complexity instead of avoiding it. Another phenomenon observed was the deviation between languages. Depending on the language spoken, complexity was judged in a different way. This fact may indicate cultural variation. The survey has taught us how complexity is perceived in the public. From our survey we can conclude that in our sample population an interest in complexity exists. A point to consider is that often people are not forced to deal with complexity directly. A cell, a dog and a computer exist as items in our daily lives but most of us do not think about their complexity in relation to other items on a daily basis. Albeit we are surrounded by complexity, it is not easy for us to name and define it.

Our second component involved interviews with experts from different backgrounds. This enabled us to broaden our horizons away from the complexity we are facing in our project to the complexity faced by people of other backgrounds. This exchange has enriched our project, as the professional fields of the interview partners as their approaches to complexity were very diverse. Our human practice has shown us the diversity of approaches of addressing complexity in our daily lives, in our professional fields, in science and when encountering complex situations. From the talk with the priest J. Fuisz we learnt that in his opinion religion and believe help us to find a way away from complexity and towards God. Thus we can live a life in trust instead of confusion and despair. According to K. Chikkadi, a scientist working with mikro- and nano systems, and Mr. Veress, a philosophy teacher, complexity arises from simple phenomena. From D. Garcia we got the following input on the perception of complexity. „Complexity is a property of a system and it can be measured. It can be shown whether a system is complex or not: for a complex system, the sum of its elements is higher than each one of them independently in superposition.“ We learned that it is often useful to simplify the complexity to obtain a more accessible approach. In the process of simplification we should not forget the relationship to reality.

Sharing as our fourth pillar was done in lectures at a high school where we aimed at explaining the fundamentals of synthetic biology and how it can be a way of approaching complexity. A science slam is defined as a scientific presentation competition where scientists present their topics in a predefined timeslot and in a funny, accessible way for the open public. In our outreach part we experienced how important it is to break the complexity of the own down to make it accessible for a broader public. On our way of spreading the word of synthetic biology we had many enriching encounters. We met many different people and encountered the phenomenon already described in our survey. The people we met all showed interest in trying to simplify complex problems and a will to understand what seems complex in first place.

We did not find a universal answer to the question guiding our human practice project. What we found are many different approaches to address complexity arising in many different fields. This project helped us to improve our understanding of complexity as a whole and how we could profit from this profound, interdisciplinary knowledge.

Complexity in our project

Wet lab

At the very beginning the work in the wet lab seemed straightforward. The way we planed our time was ambitious, but soon after the start we faced first problems. In different experiments we could observe cross-talk between the different quorum sensing molecules. In a next step we focused on quantifying the crosstalk. We found interactions between the subparts (AHLs, AHL binding molecules and promoters) on different levels. The various ways of crosstalk are characteristics of a complex system with emerging features. The whole is more than the sum of its parts; living beings, even if not multicellular have various naturally emergent properties.

In fact the observation of emergence was one of the central topics of our project. The techniques of rapid prototyping and 3D-printing followed by PDMS molding allowed us to use custom-designed millifluidic chips. The chip with the alginate bead grid on it enabled us to observe the phenomenon of guided emergence. In this case we do not have a simplification but a contextualisation. The design of our experiments aimed at the consideration of different interactive factors rather than a complete reduction of complexity. Since the knowledge of biological systems is limited such an approach seems to be nearby.

During our project we experienced that many times biological systems are not behaving as expected. While in some cases mistakes of the person planning or conducting the experiment were discovered, we could many times not localize a causation for the unexpected behavior. This taught us about the influence of parameters that have a priori not been taken into account or that are beyond our control. A cell is an open system that interacts with its environment; it is possible to reduce the number of factors influencing the system, but is not possible to eradicate them all.

Modeling

A model is always a simplistic representation of reality. Using standard descriptions, like chemical reactions and mass action, we analytically derived each formula we wanted to fit. This derivation was only possible thanks to some assumptions. As this page shows, every assumption was carefully made and thought about. The process of simplification was put into question because our human practice project tends to investigate why simplification is powerful but not enough to understand the surrounding world. In our case, a reductionist approach was indispensable. Thus we tried to legitimate every assumption in a biological way.

Our modeling part focuses on parameter fitting (see our parameter page). We used a classical deterministic model and tried to fit it to the experiments. Matching the reality level with the description level is a complicated task, as there is no optimal match. Differences and similarities between experiments and simulations give insights on where emergent phenomena could happen.

The fact that randomness is a property of complex systems motivated us to derive a stochastic model. Some biological events, like binding, are typically stochastic phenomena.

We opted for an engineered representation (see the information processing page), thus to divide our systems into simpler submodules seemed obvious. We took the fact into account that the different levels of description can give several insights on how the systems work. The decomposition into interacting submodules (see the modeling overview page) was crucial to explain the complex problem.

Influence of human practice on our scientific project

As soon as we agreed on a subject for our iGEM project, we started to observe patterns and complexity all among us. Our awareness of structures and compositions, as well as exchange and interaction between subunits, continuously increased. It quickly became a running gag among us to say: "Anyway, it is too complex".

Here we aim at describing the influence human practice had on our scientific project. Our human practice part is intricately linked to our scientific project, since we investigated in a philosophical and sociological way the concepts we tried to reproduce biologically: The emergence of a complex pattern from simple rules. By analyzing complexity and pattern formation in depth, we learned new strategies to approach them. Our human practice project allowed us to consider our scientific project from different points of view. 


In our human practice project we interviewed experts of different fields, conducted a survey and sought to outreach our experience and knowledge. Thereby we learnt new strategies of how to approach complexity, but also ways to handle it. Furthermore, we found a source of motivation and reinforcement in our human practice project.

In town planning it is crucial to not reduce a problem too much. Otherwise, the architectural intervention will be an isolated and foreign object in its surrounding. Such interventions have a high risk to fail, explained D. Übelhör. As urban systems, biological systems are highly complex. In order to understand them we tend to reduce them to single subunits. However, reductionist approaches run the risk of neglecting important information, especially when transferring behavior of subunits to the behavior of the whole. That is also what we learnt from D. Garcia, a member of the research team of Systems Design. He pointed out that in some situations reductionism is not only an unsuitable strategy but also unnecessary at the same time. Why should one struggle with details if they cannot explain the entity?

Unexplainable noise is jointly responsible for complexity. There might be ways to reduce the noise and thus increase the predictability of systems, however, we have to accept that we do not know everything. K. Chikkadi who studies micro- and nanosystems expressed this fact in a scientific context, while J. Fuisz highlighted the religious aspect of acceptance. The trust in a higher power helps to overcome complexity. Of course, this cannot be transferred to a research project literally. Anyhow, to accept that there is no human omnipotence can protect from frustration. We cannot - but we also do not have to - solve all complexity.

To not get lost while interpreting experimental data, we followed the advice of the physicist and philosopher E. Klein: we limited our ambitions in order to become efficient. Many times it is advisable to proceed in small steps rather than aiming at the full monty immediately. However, pedantic planning is always highly important especially when dealing with complexity, emphasized C. Veress, the philosophy teacher. Looking back on the past weeks and months we can only agree with that. Spending time with planning instead of rushing quite often saves time, money and work.

While spreading the word about synthetic biology we experienced the importance of a simple, comprehensible language. In fact, good communication and articulation is crucial for functional teamwork. Explaining concepts to high school students, interested visitors at the open house or during a science slam increased our awareness of the importance of communication and trained our skills at the same time.

Many participants of our survey on emergence on complexity encouraged us in our research project. They agreed on the importance of analyzing complexity and the emergence of patterns. We were very happy to get such a positive feedback and motivated to continue our studies.

Going further

In this part, we analyze the methods we used to answer our human practice question. We hope that this analysis will provide iGEMers material to think about their policy and practice project.

Survey

The internet as a media allowed us to reach more than 800 persons willing to participate in our survey. We thank each participant for its support! We are also grateful for all the people that provided us with additional comments; no matter whether these were suggestions for publications to read, complaints about the complexity of the survey or encouraging words.

We called for other iGEM team's solidarity for the survey. The idea of winning a badge for the wiki was appealing to many of them. The teams were motivated to participate as often as time allowed, since we introduced a two badge system (a colorful badge for 20 answers and a golden badge for 50 answers). In fact, two teams, namely the iGEM team Hannover and the iGEM team SDU Denmark, handed in more than 50 filled in surveys. We are impressed and grateful!

We did not define a target population, as we were too ambitious and wanted to cover all subgroups of society. However, the data set we collected is strongly biased towards students. It could be interesting to particularly design a survey concerning this part of the population.

Our goal was to learn more about the people's understanding of complexity and emergence. Even though our survey included spaces for own answers, most people chose one of the preformed answers. It would be interesting to encourage people to express themselves, so as to receive more individual answers. One option could be to ask people on the streets to answer one question, e.g.: "what is complexity for you?". Audio or video records of the interviews could be used to supplement the survey study. It would be strongly dependent on the country of investigation but it could give some unexpected insights on the topic. Moreover, it would give an occasion to increase awareness of the public on synthetic biology.

Interviews

First, we would like to thank every person that accepted to answer our questions.

As one of our goals was to investigate how complexity is taken into account in different fields, interviews seemed to be the best way to get a broad overview of different fields. We achieved to get seven personal and professional points of view about complexity. It was highly interesting to explore in details different conceptions of complexity in scientific and non-scientific fields.

An interesting interview is not self-evident. It is advisable to practice the dialogue before the real interview so as to make full use of the meeting with the interviewee. Recording the interviews could provide raw material of interest.

Outreach

We managed to have diverse outreach projects targeting several population groups, from high school students to elder people.

If outreach is an interesting task in itself, it could be advisable to stick to a more strictly defined theme or topic to be more consistent. For instance, focusing on activities for a certain age group or on media outreach through television, audio and newsletter could give a coherent whole and give rise to multiple interpretations.

Literature Work

Defining a question to answer is a difficult starting point. One has to screen literature hoping to find interesting, promising hints. Being mentored in the first part could avoid a team to go into a dead end.

As many iGEM teams we were extremely busy with our project. Reading of scientific literature on the topic of human practice is probably one of the first things to be missed out. Doing a weekly journal club on human practice could broaden the horizon of all team members and allow them to discover interesting new points of view.