Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology

A team of students from Bangalore’s Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology were judged to have made the “Best Presentation” at the prestigious International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) Competition, held on Monday, November 2nd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At iGEM, undergraduate teams from around the world compete to build innovative genetic devices in living cells, applying synthetic biology to solve problems in areas such as environment, energy, health, and foundational research. Srishti’s team of design students
included: Akash Hirosh, Avni Sethi, Dhruv Nawani, Gautam Vishwanath, Krupakar Dhinakaran, Neha Bhat, Nikhil Patil, Sandeep Mathew, Sanya Rai Gupta, and Upasana Simha. They were mentored by Yashas Shetty, an artist-in-residence at the Centre for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA), Dr. Mukund Thattai of NCBS/TIFR, and Navneet Rai, an NCBS PhD student. Describing themselves as “outsiders” in a competition dominated by engineers and scientists, the team’s project was a unique experiment in art-science collaboration: to construct bacteria which would synthesize geosmin, the substance responsible for the emotive smell of freshly ploughed earth, or of the first monsoon rains. The team’s prize-winning presentation documented their journey of discovery, as they learned the language and techniques of the life sciences and explored its cultural, ethical, and aesthetic implications. One of the presentation judges simply declared: “This changes the way I think about synthetic biology”.

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