Hello from our Human Practices (HP) team members of UBC iGEM 2024!
Thank you for taking the time to check out our new initiative, Simply Synbio. We are glad that you’re here, whether you came from a direct link sent by one of our members, our Instagram post, or just stumbled on our little page.
Our HP team is a small subteam that belongs to the wider UBC iGEM team. Our subteam considers how the research done by our iGEM team impacts society and vice versa. We focus on science outreach and communication, education, ethics, and safety considerations of synthetic biology, both in general and for our project.
Our wider team competes in the annual iGEM Jamboree, a big synthetic biology competition. iGEM stands for “International Genetically Engineered Machine,” and it’s an MIT-founded competition that brings in over 500 teams across the world to try and solve problems ranging from something as big as space travel to something close to home like trying to target small cancer cells for therapeutics - all with synthetic biology!
Simply Synbio is a project built upon what our 2023 UBC iGEM team created in the past year. The past team was able to communicate science through an animated video series; our team would like to carry on that torch, but with two new platforms - this blog and Instagram.
Through this blog, we would like you to join us in exploring new advances in science. Members of our team will be volunteering their time to break down new breakthroughs in biological engineering so that we can all enjoy and celebrate the cool science that is happening around us. Each blog post will be accompanied by an Instagram post that is even further condensed; you can find our Instagram @simplysynbio.
So that’s that. Please stay tuned for our first official post coming soon… I hear it has something to do with the ocean!
Take care,
Yejin, on behalf of the UBC iGEM Human Practices subteam