Ethics

BioEthics regarding the Biological Ethics, discussing about biological issues, have been debated since ancient times. Bioethical issues gained widespread attention in recent years and are often extremely morally contentious. Considerable societal conflict exists regarding fundamental clinical issues such as: defining the beginning and end of life; appropriate standards of care; and broader environmental issues with potential social and health impacts such as growth of genetically-modified organisms and their use in the food supply.

Here in Tsinghua iGEM 2010 Team, we are now focusing on some parts of BioEthics, such as animal handling requirement, care for animal welfare, appropriate standards of care, broader environmental issues with potential social and health impacts, impact of our products to be used in the manufacture and how to spread our ideas to make more people get this knowledge.

Thus we, Tsinghua iGEM 2010, pay our attention specially to BioEthics and keep our promise by two ways. One is to teach every member about keeping healthy, safe and being environmentally friendly while conducting experiments. The other one is to try visit and talk with more people, discussing about our projects, the current biological issues and how to promote the environment where we are living as well as let more people know about and start to be interested in Synthetic Biology and iGEM.

BioEthics in Tsinghua iGEM

Safety

According to the WHO biosafety is the prevention of unintentional exposure to pathogens and toxins, or their accidental release, whereas biosecurity is the prevention of loss, theft, misuse, diversion or intentional release of pathogens and toxins. (From https://2010.igem.org/Safety)

We are always paying special care to the safety of our teammates and the people around. Thus we signed a document to keep in rules about the Safety in Laboratory, not only to protect ourselves but also help to keep a clean and healthy environment.

The model animals we used are harmless engineering strains of Escherichia coli. They are widely used in all kinds of laboratories around the world. All the staffs and students operating the infrastructures, devices and anything related with experiments are required to wear the gloves all the time while working. To keep these in rules and in case of any accidents we carried out a document to keep in line with.

Tsinghua iGEM 2010 Safety Manual

Activities

Shanghai Meetup

More Info at 2010 iGEM China meetup

This year, on August 5th, teams from universities in China, SJTU-BioX-Shanghai, Tsinghua, Peking, ECUST-Shanghai, USTC, USTC_Software, ZJU-China and Sun Yat-sen University all gathered in Shanghai and had a nice day at the iGEM 2010 China Meetup.

Tsinghua University Lecture Day

A Visit to Macquarie_iGEM