Team:Jilin China/Engagement
Human Practices
As a new frontier of science, synthetic biology is not well introduced to the high school students in China. We would like to stimulate their interests in science by giving them opportunities to know the exciting progress and great potential of synthetic biology. Therefore, we gave a seminar to the students at the High School Affiliated to Jilin University about our project and synthetic biology in general. Since they did not know much background knowledge about synthetic biology, we gave them a good introduction about synthetic biology and the iGEM competition at the beginning. We then gave a detailed discussion about our project. We told the students how we designed our project and explained how our system should work. Finally we shared with them what we had learned during the iGEM competition. The high school students were excited about the synthetic biology and our project, some of them even showed great interests in becoming an iGEMer. To give them a chance to know our work better, we even invited them to visit our laboratory. We hope that our work can inspire them to find their own interests in science.
Youth Education
We always care about the young generation, and we hope our project will have a positive influence on high school students. Therefore, we introduced our project to students at the High School Affiliated to Jilin University. They do not know much about the Synthetic Biology, so we gave a brief introduction about Synthetic Biology and the iGEM competition at the beginning. Then we gave a detailed description about our project. The possibility of using bacteriotherapy to cure cancer was the major topic of our talk, as the major approaches to treat cancer have been radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery. We told the students how we designed our genes and how we electrotransfered them into bifidobacteriums. We also explained how our system worked. We also invited them to visit our lab. Not many students showed much interests in our presentation at the beginning of our presentation. However, more and more students showed great interest about our project during our presentation. After we finished our speech, we gave them the e-mail address of our team. Those who are interested in our project could contact our team and get more detailed information about our project and synthetic biology.
Youth Education
We think our presentation stimulate their interest in science. We want to introduce more about biological science to those high school students in the future, and we hope some of them will be iGEMers latter!
5.TEDxJLU
TEDxJLU Conference was held in Jilin University in October 19th, 2016. We found it is a good opportunity to let people know synthetic biology and iGEM, so we gave a very good talk for this conference.
Our team was the third one to give the talk and the team member, Tingtao Wu, took the responsibility. Firstly, he introduced synthetic biology by giving the examples of the synthesis of artemisnin and the work of Jeff, which used the method of synthetic biology to assist in curing cancer. Then, Luwei Huang briefly introduced the definition of synthetic biology and its advantages. Subsequently, some problems were discussed and many potential resolutions were proposed.
5.TEDxJLU
Secondly, Yuwei Huang started to introduce iGEM to the audience, which was also the most important part of this talk. He started with the history of iGEM and its recent development. Then, Mingjun Zhang introduceed the primary responsibillities of members who want to participate in the competition. After that, some main contributions that iGEM has made to the development of synthetic biology were also introduced, including the construction of RSBP and some novel ideas raised from the competition. In addition, some achievements that the previous teams made were also included in this part.
At last, this speech was concluded with the introduction of our own project. Since the time was limited, we just introduced the basic ideas and the important progresses of our project. We also illustrated some of our results from experiments, human practice and wiki.
The talk was a big success, since the audience showed great interests in synthetic biology and the treatment of solid tumors. It also promoted the public awareness of iGEM among universities in Northeast region of China.
TV Interviews
Our iGEM project gets high attention and positive responses from all life sciences teachers and even directors of the Academic Affairs Division Office at Jilin University.
To support our project and spread the influence of iGEM, our Jilin University News Network interviewed our Jilin_China 2016 iGEM Team early in 2016. Through this educational TV exhibition, we shared our project idea as well as basic synthetic biology concepts with the public. We are informed that the interview about us reached a vast audience throughout the whole University.
