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Team:Alberta/human practices
From 2010.igem.org
Human Practices
As an educational kit, GENOMIKON is itself a project strongly involved with the human practices of synthetic biology. The kit is an introduction to synthetic biology teaching the next wave of students about its principles and practices, even before they enroll in university. The goal of our project was to create a functional kit capable of assembling complete plasmids to be used in educational setting and GENOMIKON is highly successful in this regard. However, the GENOMIKON kit will never teach anyone if it never makes its way to classrooms. With this in mind, we decided to do the human practice portion of our project directly addressing this problem.
Business Plan and Market Analysis
Our team began imagining ways to accommodate the global demand for GENOMIKON, with the goal of getting the kit in each and every high school all around the world. To address this issue of accessibility, undergraduate students from the University’s School of Business created a hypothetical business plan and market analysis to bring GENOMIKON to the market. A business plan was created because we recognize that, in our society, the marketplace is the most efficient means to manufacture and distribute a good to the greatest number of consumers. This business plan is designed to help our project to have the biggest impact on humanity to share the knowledge of synthetic biology to as many people as possible.
Social Aspect
iGEM within Alberta is about making lifelong friends and colleagues, as well as learning valuable problem solving and research based skills. All the Alberta teams (University of Alberta, University of Calgary and the University of Lethbridge) met at least once in each hometown to exchange ideas and work together towards our individual project goals in workshops and our yearly aGEM competition. aGEM serves as a testing ground for each teams projects and allows each team to receive feedback from experts in multiple disciplines and from the other teams. The close relationships between the teams is helped by AITF, which helps to collaborate aGEM among the other meetings. The Albertan teams may compete against each other, but we all enjoyed taking each other out on the town during the three times we met this year and exchanging ideas with one another.
