Poor economic conditions, discrimination based on gender or race, a lack of access to quality education, and a variety of other factors prevent many people around the world from realizing their full potential and making meaningful contributions to society. “Science is risky and expensive,” says Donna Ginther, a labor economist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. However, if given proper support, many bright young individuals who lack resources and chances can produce remarkable work and make outstanding contributions to academic science. Gender inequalities in productivity and effect have grown along with the rise in women's engagement in science during the past 60 years. But surprisingly, men and women both publish at the same annual pace, with the same effects on their careers for jobs of the same size. Therefore, it is crucial for academic science to appreciate diversity and be inclusive.

As an iGEM 2022 team that values diversity and inclusion, ZJUintl-China is adept at identifying and addressing inequalities in academia. ZJUintl China’s efforts are visible in a variety of ways. For example, the problem of recruiting team members, the problem of team division of labor and cooperation, and the problem of team financial management. When we present our team's accomplishments, we focus on groups to help them participate and contribute their wisdom more effectively. At the same time, when it comes to ideas that contradict the ZJUintl-China scheme, we are good at learning and accepting the ideas of people from different places and with different statuses. We hope that by encouraging creative thought, we might advance synthetic biology.

Recruitment of team members

To recruit members, our team first promoted iGEM 2022 and synthetic biology on campus through the WeChat official account, a popular public communication platform in China. The tweet was shared widely across the school to ensure that anyone interested in synthetic biology would have the opportunity to sign up. We treat every student who submits a resume fairly and selects team members strictly according to the requirements of the composition of the team members. Inclusively screen students with certain biological knowledge and literature reading ability, students who are good at designing experiments, students who are good at wet experiments, students who are good at mathematical modeling, and other abilities. We do our best to balance out everyone on the squad. The selection of team members was fair and unbiased, regardless of gender, religion, and specialty.

Task allocation

We share individual responsibilities widely amongst ourselves as a team. The workloads of our team members are fairly distributed since we play to their individual talents. Each member of the Benching, our online lab notebook, has a profile detailing their individual contributions to the team's overall goals and objectives. A team member's progress on a job should be updated often. In the event that a team member is unable to meet the deadline for any reason, the other members of the team will work together to get the job done. Our crew has always worked together in peace over the months we've spent together. No one is ever singled out or made to feel unwelcome because of who they are as a person. We can all learn and grow in this kind of welcoming collaborative setting.

Funding allocation

Our team's participation in iGEM 2022 was supported by grants from the Zhejiang University Medical Center and the Zhejiang University - University of Edinburgh institute. The scientific research budget was split in three ways: dry group, wet group, and human practice group depending on the needs and realities of the study. We used Benching to keep track of all of our expenditures. The team members and the team itself exercised oversight over one another to control spending and ensure equity. By involving everyone on the team, we can maximize the effectiveness of everyone's time, energy, and resources.

Publicity

We can communicate with the public primarily in two ways. First, we published tweets on our WeChat official account to inform the public—who are able to use electronic devices, self-reading, and self-learning—about synthetic biology, immunotherapy for anti-aging, and our team's research. The intended audience for this article mostly includes professors, researchers, and novices in synthetic biology who are interested in learning more about the subject. Second, provide public science lectures in underprivileged and educationally underdeveloped communities. We take into account that there are impoverished families in society as well and that these poor families lack the means to utilize electronic devices and have no access to modern cutting-edge technology. In order to reach youngsters from various hilly and ethnic minority areas in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Hunan, our team performed online face-to-face lectures with them. At the same time, we personally visited the site to deliver popular scientific lectures. See the Human Practice Education Section for more information on these subsections. Because there were few teaching resources available, we created engaging comics to teach kids the fundamentals of synthetic biology, the human immune system, and the idea and use of CAR. Through this engaging, fascinating, and interactive popular science lecture, we hope to popularise some biological knowledge among kids and help them discover the inner workings of the human body and the human immune system. Additionally, it will assist kids in focusing on cutting-edge medical research and understanding the potential of CAR-T cell immunotherapy for cancer. We make an effort to give individuals from various backgrounds the opportunity to study synthetic biology.

Mini-chat

A unique aspect of our team is the mini-chat interview. The Mini-chat interview is quite inclusive and diverse. Our team conducts in-depth, point-by-point research for the general public with the goal of eliciting feedback and suggestions from the general public and systematically enhancing market demand and product competitiveness. Our team spoke with a businessman from Quzhou, Zhejiang Province, a junior clinical medicine student, a business student from North China, a pharmacy major from North China Medical University, as well as some respected academics in related subjects. See the Human Practice Public Engagement section for further information. We were able to gain insight from people of various identities through interviews, which will help advance the study of synthetic biology and anti-aging cell therapies.

Wiki website design

The wiki is an essential component of our participation in iGEM 2022 and provides an excellent venue for presenting our work to the general public while also raising awareness about synthetic biology. Everyone who has a physical disability that makes it difficult for them to read the site is taken into consideration when the website for our team is being designed. The challenges faced by users of our website due to red-green color blindness, low vision, or color blindness have been taken into consideration during the design process. We stay away from using red or green as a contrast indicator because more than 99% of persons with color blindness have problems perceiving red and green. Additionally, they have difficulty understanding the text when the contrast between the text and the backdrop color is low. We make an effort to use colors with a high contrast ratio and communicate information through various other visual means.