Throughout the season, we thoroughly collaborated with two other iGEM teams in our local area: Canyon Crest Academy (CCA_San_Diego) and Westview High School (WVHS_SanDiego). We got in touch early in the season – towards the end of May – and set up a Discord server for members from each team to join, in order to maintain an easy and organized form of contact. We regularly met over Discord calls biweekly. At every meeting, each team provided updates on their own project, and the other two teams gave feedback and ideas for improvement.
Our biggest undertaking this year was hosting an in-person ethics symposium, which we extensively planned for weeks, starting in early August. After extensive communication, we used the J. Craig Venter Institute as our venue for the symposium. We secured permission to use Del Norte’s auditorium as backup. Next, each team was responsible for preparing presentations to share the synthetic biology behind the projects, as well as the ethics involved. Each team also invited students from their school who were involved in research to speak on their experiences. In doing so, we hoped to give other students who are also interested in research the opportunity to share their projects and insights to a larger audience; we were able to broaden the scope of the symposium from just our iGEM projects to ethics in research of all kinds, thus appealing to a wider audience.
We held the symposium on October 3rd. At the symposium, each team’s designated speaker presented their projects, as planned. After each presentation, we set aside time for the audience to ask any questions they had and provide feedback. After CCA, Del Norte, and Westview had all finished speaking, Trevor Chen, a student at Westview (who is not affiliated with the Westview iGEM team) presented a keynote on the current applications and concerns with environmental ethics in synthetic biology, based on his own experience with bioinformatics and computational biology. Another student speaker was CCA’s Amogh Chaturvedi, who spoke about the ethics of dealing with patient data, as he recently conducted research on data integration. In addition, a panel comprising a representative from each iGEM team had a discussion about research ethics, with an emphasis on environmental ethics. Since all three schools’ projects are heavily environment-oriented, we wanted to explore the many precautions that had to be taken to ensure that our projects were not disrupting natural processes. Once again, the panel was open to audience questions. Lastly, Dr. Yo Suzuki, CCA’s mentor and an assistant professor working in the Synthetic Biology group at JCVI, kindly agreed to give a presentation about his research and the ethics behind it. This gave the iGEM teams, student speakers, and the audience the valuable opportunity to hear the perspective of a professional in the field.
CCA’s project presentation
Del Norte's project presentation
Westview's project presentation
(Non-iGEM) student speaker - Trevor Chen
Student panel
We are all proud of the time and effort we put into this symposium. Through the long and difficult process of planning, we were able to grow closer to the CCA and Westview teams, because we had to communicate every step of the way; every setback had to be immediately reported to the other teams, and we would then work together to try to brainstorm a solution. For example, after we had already agreed upon a date, created an RSVP form and publicized the symposium, CCA received word that the date did not work for JCVI. We had to hastily regroup in order to reschedule and send out clarifying emails to those who had RSVP'd. Despite these issues, we were able to host the symposium at a later date. What started as a small idea that arose during our interschool meetings grew into a genuine vision shared by all three schools, which was finally brought to life. It was incredibly rewarding to see, and we are all very glad that we could share our hard work while also giving back to our community in a way that audience members could walk away having gained new knowledge.
