The project, from its outset, has been guided by a multitude of values as its creation and impact lie at the intersection of multiple scientific and social objectives. As such, the team has iterated through the project multiple times creating large changes that may seem to come at the expense of time. In reality however, this has resulted in a project that has been backed by more people than what would’ve been possible originally.
The climate justice movement is built on advances in racial justice, legislation and scientific innovation. What started as a scientific pursuit has since become one centered on community both internally and externally. Towards this end, our members have engaged with communities in the context of both our project and academic research at-large. We value showing up for at-risk communities. From advocating for equitable and sustainable housing development to championing disability justice to understanding the climate-related plights of undocumented migrants, the team has shown up to support and to listen to communities in keeping with our moral values that have guided us.
An often ignored aspect of inclusion in academia is that of accessibility. Most conferences still lack readily available resources for attendees and presenters who are hard of hearing or visually impaired. In an effort to call attention to necessary changes, team members gave extensive presentations to professional societies at UC San Diego like ISPE. The goal of these presentations was to make students more aware of the ways in which they could be fostering a more inclusive environment by giving them examples of academics who have actively worked towards making their labs and the spaces they occupy more accessible. Presentations also covered basic history on the disability, justice movement, and current pushes within the school. Certain team members also joined broader efforts within the school to ask for increased focus on disability justice with UC San Diego’s student government’s Office of Academic Affairs.
In an effort to ensure that our team remains accessible, all videos and other materials have alt text added to them. Additionally, all meetings are held in a hybrid setting to allow for flexibility and maximum participation from team members.
A major aspect of our research into applications of our innovation was how it could help underrepresented and marginalized communities. Being far removed from technologies such as the ones we are working on, undocumented migrants and working-class Americans who are most at-risk of suffering the consequences of global boiling will often receive access to helpful tech slowest. In an effort to understand the needs of those traditionally reached last, team members activated to interview undocumented migrants at Jacumba while working with UC San Diego organizers conducting research and bringing migrants thousands of dollars in supplies, including personal hygiene products, umbrellas (for heat protection), food, soap and more. This helped the team both develop a greater appreciation for how the climate emergency is actively hurting people while partaking in incremental efforts to help migrants out.
When our group first set out on this project, we had little idea as a collective about the rich community that was present in the context of synthetic biology for climate action purposes. Naturally, our first instinct was to contact people in the community and understand where our project was placed within this realm. Our first attempt at reaching out was through interviews we conducted with senior members of the lab and of the synthetic biology group at JCVI in general. These interviews enabled us to both come up with better engineering designs for our project, as well as start discussions with senior figures in the field about the oversized role that a project such as ours can take in the grand scheme of synthetic biology. We did not stop after those first rounds of interviews. We consulted researchers and the general bioengineering community at conferences such as the BE Day at UCSD. We read literature about carbon sequestration to determine a need for a synthetic solution, both from a scientific and social perspective. At the same time, we also got in contact with Adam Aron, a climate change researcher at UCSD, who gave us a copy of his book about the psychology of climate change that, along with other environmental activists, helped us better understand how our project fits into the climate action world. These conversations have also helped us ensure that we respect our project for what it can do for carbon fixation without disingenuously marketing it as a panacea to all climate emergency-related problems.
Our goal was clear: Propose a solution to one of the key issues driving climate change. However, there were aspects of our project whose impact we had to consider with regards to environmental impact. Synthetic biology projects that seek to create a GMO have to reconcile eventually with the fact that biocontainment and biosafety are major concerns. We chose the minimal cell, an organism that is well-understood and can grow only in very specific laboratory conditions, partly for this reason. Working with such a minimal cell enables us to proceed with full confidence that what we do will lower the risk of contamination to a minimum. At the same time, we compared the pros and cons of different carbon fixation pathways and settled on the POAP cycle because of its impressive rates of carbon fixation. We consider this to be good for the world because deploying the POAP cycle will maximize the intake of atmospheric CO2, and it does not produce hazardous or toxic byproducts which again minimizes risks associated with this carbon fixation system. Combined with the ability to easily build new functions in the minimal cell from the ground up, we have the flexibility to direct assimilated CO2 to the production of valuable compounds, biofuels, or to be mineralized for carbon sequestration. This freedom in directing fixed CO2 into different metabolic pipelines is good for the world as we can turn fixed CO2 into different products of interest based on the needs of diverse communities around the world.
In the effort of incorporating human practices into our project, our team is composed of brilliant leaders and researchers from diverse backgrounds. We have team members representing different communities and ethnic backgrounds as well as members who have different expertise. From the bioinformaticians to community leaders that commit themselves to helping the disadvantaged through their non-profit startup and humanitarian work, we know that to implement human practices means that our team must have diverse opinions to point out diverse problems and provide diverse solutions. This is why our team strives to not only consider human practices from a scientific perspective, but to hone our project such that it addresses the concerns of different communities.