This blog is where we share stories, announcements, and insights from around the iGEM community.
All in iGEM Blog
Celebration is integral to the iGEM journey. Being happy and grateful for the milestones reached can help us through the challenges and difficult times we may face in forging a better future with synthetic biology.
Since beginning in 2003, iGEM has inspired thousands of students to build a better world by using synthetic biology to solve local problems and tackle global challenges. Now as leaders in academia, government and industry in over 45 countries, iGEMers are significantly advancing synthetic biology and contributing to society.
The iGEM community is a wonderfully diverse group of people from all over the world who are passionate about developing and applying the tools of synthetic biology to address the challenges facing our world today.
Here we are in the future, and iGEM 2021 promises to be bright as ever. This year, we will again embrace the 4 C’s of iGEM – Competition, Community, Contribution and Celebration – as we welcome returning and new iGEMers to the 2021 season.
From the COVID-19 pandemic, iGEM has emerged stronger than ever before, with new paths for advancing synthetic biology and making iGEM available to virtually every community across the globe.
The iGEM Video Universe is a decisive milestone in creating the future iGEM. For the first time, it is possible to watch (or even binge-watch) the Project Promotion Videos and Presentation Videos from every team participating in the iGEM competition, as well as Keynotes, Workshops, and Interviews from the iGEM 2020 season and Virtual Giant Jamboree.
If we could choose one word to describe the iGEM 2020 Virtual Giant Jamboree, it’s resilience. In the eight months since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization, we’ve seen incredibly resilient iGEM team members, instructors, judges, committee members, sponsors and community members emerge as role models and heroes. And their resilience shone throughout the ten days for Competition, Community, Contribution and Celebration at the iGEM 2020 Virtual Giant Jamboree.
In this exceptional year, iGEM teams have journeyed down a path that is different from any previous year, and far more challenging, exciting, and rewarding than any of us could have imagined. As we approach the eve of the 2020 iGEM Virtual Giant Jamboree (VGJ), we invite you to imagine your journey through the 4C’s of the iGEM VGJ: Competition, Community, Contribution, Celebration.
Each year since iGEM began, our community has gathered in-person to marvel at and celebrate the achievements of the teams in engineering biological solutions for global challenges and building the field of synthetic biology. Our in-person gatherings provided a wealth of novel opportunities for conversation, and fostered an easy and candid exchange of ideas and opinions, encouraged by the simple fact that everyone had left their offices and campuses behind.
We are excited to present this interview series to celebrate women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). The main idea of this interview series is to inspire the current and next generations of women and girls who are interested in science. For this series, we gathered speakers with diverse backgrounds and experience from different regions, all of them doing amazing jobs and leading their fields.
You are probably familiar with Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, the archetypal cautionary tale for science experiments that are not responsible or good for the world. Did you know that Mary Shelley conceived of the idea when she was 18 years old and forced inside all summer with a small circle of family and friends?
The iGEM 2018 Interlab study, which was just published in Nature Communications Biology, presents a cheap and easy protocol for estimating cell count and per-cell fluorescence on plate readers.
Judges start learning about your project by reading your wiki. Then, when we’re filling out our judging ballots, we look over the wiki again to make sure we’ve remembered everything right. So what does this mean for how you tell your story?
Through iGEM Insights, we aim leverage data from iGEM as a unique open and international testbed to both improve the competition and the practice of synthetic biology (and science and engineering more broadly) beyond the competition.
It was through attending the Biological Weapons Convention as an iGEM Delegate that I realized how neglected biosecurity issues were and fully embraced the duty that scientists have to engage with policy-makers.
The iGEM 2020 Global Meet-up celebrated the diversity and international spirit of our community, with more than half of the events and activities organized by the iGEM teams themselves.
At iGEM, it is important to give credit where credit is due. Indeed, integrity, honesty and respect are among the iGEM values that all teams are expected to uphold.
The SDGs are 17 goals that are set to be achieved by the global community by 2030, and they represent indicators of technical progress and societal goals that we and others can help strive to achieve. In particular, the SDGs are a way for institutions to align their resources and to open communications and engage with stakeholders in addressing the global challenges we face.
We invite you to join your fellow iGEMers from all over the world to connect, collaborate and celebrate at the first-ever iGEM Global Meet-up. With over 50% of the activities led by iGEM 2020 teams, the iGEM Global Meet-up is your chance to meet and engage with your fellow iGEMers!
