Ideation Introduction
Our iGEM journey as team Cambridge 2022 began in the early months of 2022. We came together in the cold winter months over our mutual love for synthetic biology and a shared understanding of the opportunities iGEM offers us in facilitating us to make a positive contribution to the scientific community and to address real-world issues that we are concerned about.
Our approach to idea generation was to first consider what issues there are that we are passionate about and what aspects of iGEM enthuse us most. This is because we believe that a successful iGEM project, and indeed successful scientific research in general, is born from an authentic interest in the subject and a goal that we can rally behind as a team (see human practices).
We were lucky enough to attend a workshop by Charlie Wedd about ‘Effective Altruism’. This led us to consider whether our idea would actually have the positive change we were hoping for. We have documented our project ideation process because we believe that it is a central and indispensable part of our iGEM journey and our journey to the formation of 'ADAPTR'.Throughout we carried out a cyclic nature of the idea generation, research and refinement process.
Febuary
- First team meeting.
- Learning more about iGEM- What is the timeline? What is possible? What has been done before?
- Talking to our advisors and about their experiences with iGEM; we are lucky to be advised by multiple postgraduates who have participated in the iGEM competition before at different unviersities.
- Thinking about why we want to compete in the iGEM competition, what we want to achieve and what we want to gain from the opportunity.
March
- Brainstorming begins!
- What problems do we care about and want to solve? What issues are we passionate about?
As a team, themes of environment concern, food security and tackling human disease were the most pervasive. - What aspects of synthetic biology excite us? As a team we expressed enthusiasm for cell biology, biotechnology and for the role of physics, maths and engineering within synthetic biology. We were in mutual excitement about the interdisciplinary opportunities synthetic biology offers.
April
- Brainstorming continues, thinking about more specific topics of interest to us all; problems ranging from parkinsons to the environment.
- We then tried to identify possible solutions to these more specific problems, using ideas from discussions about which technologies and concepts were of interest to us.
- Each team member chose a couple of problems, carried out extensive literature reviews and explored possible solutions and then pitched their findings to the group.
May
- The team iterated through more cycles of identifying possible projects, using a problem-based approach, with each team member carrying out literature reviews and reporting back to the group their findings.
- From the dozen or so projects that team members had researched further we could then proceed to streamline our ideas.
- One project at this stage was concerned with microbial drug delivery and the problems that the noisy environment of human bodies poses when thinking about this technology. It was here that feedback circuits began being discussed in detail and concepts from control theory were introduced; it was realised that the solutions to the problems associated with microbial drug delivery, specifically engineering cells to better adapt, were applicable to other issues too.
June
- The process of narrowing down our project ideas continues. This included further literature reviews and consultations with our advisory team, as well as contacting senior academics for their opinion.
- We considered the feasibility of the projects in question given the time constraints and then considered how each project might look over the course of the summer, identifying in each case what the aims of the project would be.
- We attended a workshop from Charlie Wedd about 'effective altruism'. This helped us in our final decisions about which project to commit to. The idea behind effective altruism is to use evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and take action on that basis.
Inspired by this, we decided to commit to our project of trying to implement a circuit to allow cells to better adapt to perturbations since we believe this could have a wide variety of applications and would have the power to positively influence the environment, therapeutics, diagnostics etc.. By choosing a project with so many applications we are addressing multiple issues that we feel passionate about, as a team and as individuals!
