November 9, 2010

Fictional Super Cell Market Imagines Synbio Products

iGEM Team Weimer-Heidelburg Arts Kickstarts Public Awareness

As part of their entry to the 2010 iGEM competition, Team Weimar-Heidelburg Arts has put together a speculative webshop of synthetic biology products.

"The project Super Cell is a fictional supermarket offering speculative products, which are all based on Synthetic Biology. The projects aims to improve public awareness about Synthetic Biology and at the same time, foster a debate on how we want to see it manifested in our everyday lives. Implications of Biotechnologies are usually discussed on a philosophical, ethical, legal or possibly religious level. All these areas share a pretty abstract perspective on the matter. By designing speculative products and presenting them in a familiar environment such as a webshop, we aim to create tangible manifestations which allow specialists and non-specialists to engage in a discussion about the desired and undesired implications of Synthetic Biology. If we--as a society--want to influence how this powerful science will affect our future lives, this kind of discussion is essential to have now." [Source]

Click here to see Super-Cell.