The Open Philanthropy Project awarded a grant of $520,000 over three years to the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation to help iGEM grow its safety and security staff and to support a pilot workshop on safety and security led by iGEM advisors.
iGEM is an international synthetic biology competition for students. We believe that supporting iGEM’s safety and security work could be directly beneficial for the competition, and could also provide valuable opportunities to identify and test new safety and security measures for the field of synthetic biology more broadly.