Team:UST Beijing/HP/Silver
Public engagement
It is worth noting that People have a great prejudice against synthetic biology and genetically modified organisms. So it is important for us to include in our project topics such as ethics, culture, society, and accessibility of information to the general public in an unusual way.
Our Human Practices project focused on spreading a basic understanding of synthetic biology to the general public. Our group worked and cooperated with another research team from Peking University in order to develop, communicate, and create a diverse and creative project. We try to realize the science popularization and promotion of synthetic biology from many aspects. We investigated the understanding and perception of the majority of people to synthetic biology on the Internet, contacted with numerous organizations to host educational Synthetic Biology workshops for the public and to implement our educational booklet into societies in Beijing. What’s more, we establish an educational Synthetic Biology public platform, to further sustain our efforts for years to come.
Culture and investigation
We launch a discussion about Synthetic Biology on micro-blog on August this year and we found some very interesting results. To our surprise, compared to young people or students, many adults have a large bias in synthetic biology. Because many middle-aged or elderly people did not accept the education of synthesize biological, they know nothing about this knowledge. However, some untrue reports excessively emphasis the hazards of genetically modified product, so many middle-aged people regard transgenic technique as monster. We realized that it was very important to enhance public understanding of synthetic biology.
Education and public outreach
Since September 2016，we picked some places where people are more concentrated, such as the National Library and many residential neighborhood, and got their permissions of giving publicity to the IGEM competition and the knowledge of synthetic biology. At the same time, we produced some brochures about synthetic biology and banners of our IGEM project.
During 12-28th, September, members of our IGEM team came to three Residential quarters and introduced our project to those residents. We sent a lot of brochures and our banners attracted many residents’ attentions. Then we introduced the basic knowledge of Synthetic Biology to them and demonstrated how Synthetic Biology can make our world better. Meanwhile, we told them what our IGEM is and what we do is trying to improve people’s health. Although there were still a part of the residents questioned genetically modified foods, most of them were curious about the biology world and asked many questions related to our work. They were amazed after being told that synthetic biology can change the world when human use it in a rational way. Our brochures can be soon distributed every time.
Through all of these human practices activities, we were aware of the importance of biotechnology education to the public. And the questions and concerns from residents provided us with amazing future research goals.
Media and public platform
We built a WeChat public platform to make more people know synthetic biology and our IGEM project. The purpose of our activities was to answer questions on various subjects that will integrate with the laboratory work. And we would like to share the latest news about synthetic biology. We did our best to invest our time and energy in a real long-lasting contribution.
Summary
Through this communication with fellows in Tsinghua University, we have learned much about automation. It not only expanded our horizons, but also enlightened us that the combination of biology and information theory would have a broad prospect. Besides, fellows in Tsinghua University also impressed by our creative ideas of conducting experiments. In short, it’s been a pleasant and successful communication.
