Doing Human Practices During A Global Pandemic
by Tessa Alexanian, on behalf of the Human Practices committee
The Human Practices committee also gave a session on this topic at the iGEM 2020 Opening Weekend Festival (Video: YouTube, Bilibili)
If you’re involved in iGEM, chances are you’ve become the Designated Coronavirus Explainer for at least a few of your friends and family members. You’ve probably been asked questions like, “is it safe to travel?” and “is the virus mutating?” and “is there going to be a vaccine?”
It feels especially important, right now, to think about how to be a responsible synthetic biologist, the sort who deserves the trust of these friends and family members. With so many lives and livelihoods on the line, the need for evidence-informed decision making is unusually stark. But how do we generate evidence that is useful to decision-makers?
More broadly, how can we do science in a way that will serve society?
These questions are at the heart of iGEM’s Human Practices program. We ask iGEM teams to reflect upon their values, consider ethical issues, invite stakeholder input, and otherwise respond to the societal dimensions of their projects. In 2020, Human Practices considerations are more relevant than ever.
We know many iGEM teams will have limited laboratory access this year, and we encourage you to think carefully before hosting public events or organizing face-to-face meetings. The Human Practices committee wanted to share a few ideas for how your team can succeed at human practices in this strange time.
Signs of this strange time: physical distancing circles painted onto the grass of a park near the author’s home. (Image: Cristopher Michel on Flickr.)
1. Go to the (online) library.
No matter your project topic, I guarantee that researchers in bioethics, science and technology studies, and social science have raised important issues related to it. Your team’s Human Practices work can be part of an ongoing conversation about responsible science— you don’t need to think this through on your own!
Just to share a few examples, the Exeter 2019 team experimented with several Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) frameworks, seeing how different frameworks generated different insights related to their microplastic filtration project. The Bielefeld 2017 team wrote a report summarizing ethical, philosophical, medical, and religious perspectives on their non-canonical amino acids project.
If you want help getting started, I recommend the Opening Weekend Festival session on How to Find Insights from Social Science Research Related to Your Project (Video: YouTube | Bilibili).
2. Engage virtually.
Many of the ways teams have engaged with stakeholders in previous years—visiting local farms and factories, interviewing local religious or political leaders, and even travelling to different countries—will be challenging in 2020.
However, you may be able to meet with people online or speak to them on the phone. Many iGEM teams have done this in the past, consulting with people around the world and documenting the interviews on their wikis; the GreatBay China 2018 team provides an excellent example of this kind of documentation..
You may want to gather opinions from a wider range of people than you could interview directly; in this case, your team might want to design a survey. Surveys are a form of experiment, and like any experiment, they can be designed and implemented poorly. A poorly designed survey will give you ambiguous results or even misleading, biased responses. I’d recommend watching the Opening Weekend Festival Session on Designing Scientifically Valid Surveys (Video: YouTube | Bilibili) and consulting iGEM’s Human Subjects Research policy for help getting started.
3. Explore the implications of previous (or future) wet lab work
Your team might not be able to spend much time in the lab this year. That’s okay. One of the foundational guiding ideas of iGEM is collaboration and shared knowledge. There’s a reason we have every team create an online wiki and upload their work to a public registry of biological parts. Your team may be able to collaborate with another team that has more lab access (post a request here) or build upon the wet lab results of a past team.
If your team decides to do a Two-Phase Project, you could spend all of 2020 in the design phase of a project that you’d implement in a later year. This means you’ll be doing a lot of Human Practices work; many design questions are also Human Practices questions: How do you decide what change you want to make in the world? What values—environmental, social, moral, scientific, or other—define your goals? Why is synthetic biology an appropriate way to reach those goals?
The Valencia UPV 2018 team used Human Practices to inform the design of their hardware project, which went on to win the grand prize at the Jamboree. (Credit: Valencia UPV wiki.)
4. Address accessibility, security, and other dry lab concerns
There are plenty of Human Practices issues to investigate even if your team doesn’t do any wet lab work at all.
The Valencia UPV 2018 team did a market segmentation analysis for their accessible, easy-to-use biological printer. They then explored the Kano model methodology for gathering feedback, ranking user preferences, and adapting their design. The team carefully documented their process and results to encourage future iGEM teams to use the methodology, showing how an entrepreneurial, hardware-focused project can incorporate many Human Practices approaches.
Team SYSU Software 2017 incorporated ideas from their consultations with ethicists, intellectual property experts, and many potential users into their synthetic biology design simulation software. Team Marburg 2018 did a wet lab project, but perhaps their most impressive integration of Human Practices was in the design of their wiki and Jamboree presentation, which followed accessibility best practices learned from visually impaired students.
5. Go Meta
At the beginning of this piece, we asked, “how can we do science in a way that will serve society?” Human Practices work often focuses on how the world affects the design and goals of your project—the what and the why—but your team might also want to think about the how. That is, how are you producing scientific knowledge? How do the incentives of the iGEM competition affect the work that you do? How do the structure, organization, and demographics of your team shape your project?
The Paris Bettencourt 2013 team conducted a study investigating gender representation in synthetic biology labs, conferences and publications and at iGEM, and they analyzed what their results might mean for future efforts to promote gender equality in science. Their critique of iGEM’s gender imbalances contributed to the formation of the iGEM Diversity & Inclusion Committee.
Other teams, like Waterloo 2016, have looked at how collaborations between teams have impacted their success within the competition. This led to a larger project between iGEM and Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) to understand how collaborations shape scientific knowledge. You can learn more about that through the Opening Weekend Festival Session on iGEM Insights: Understanding iGEM Through Data (Video: YouTube | Bilibili).
The collaborations between teams in the 2016 iGEM competition, as visualized by researchers from JOGL and iGEM Insights. (Credit: iGEM Insights.)
These are just a few ideas—Human Practices isn’t about doing any specific activity, but instead about being reflective, responsible, and responsive scientists. It’s a weird, scary time right now, but I think the iGEM community can contribute to making it less scary. The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought together science and society in a way that most of us have not witnessed in our lifetimes. Your iGEM projects can be part of a story of how synthetic biology contributes to a safer, kinder, better society, even in difficult times.
If you have more questions, or if there are additional resources that the Human Practices Committee could offer your team, please get in touch with us at humanpractices@igem.org.
