Team:BostonU/HP
On June 26, we participated in the Museum of Science's "Building with Biology" event. At this event, we assisted in guiding a forum discussion that was open to members of the public. The subject of the forum was genetically engineering mosquitoes to control their population. The forum consisted of a short presentation followed by the members of the public breaking into groups of five to ten. From there, they discussed how/if genetically engineered mosquitoes should be implemented, using a set of pre-written questions to guide their discussion. With our team mediating the discussion, members of the public were able to learn key principles of synthetic biology, as well as consider the applications and ethical implications of the field. This experience taught us that forums could act as a tool to make synthetic biology interesting and accessible to the public.
In July, we volunteered to host a program called Summer Pathways which introduces high school students to STEM fields. We were asked to come up with an activity for them to participate in that would introduce them to synthetic biology. We remembered how useful the forums from the Museum of Science were in introducing synthetic biology to the public, and so we decided to write our own forum to use with the high schoolers. We chose to write our forum from scratch and chose the subject to be martian colonization. This subject incorporates many applications of synthetic biology and is a relatively exciting topic. Therefore, we thought it was the best subject to introduce synthetic biology to the Summer Pathways group. As a group, we managed to write a forum that created a lively ethical discussion. We enjoyed writing the forum from scratch and we were happy with its the success of its implementation with Summer Pathways.
We chose four subjects to begin writing our series of forums: GMO foods, engineering mosquitoes, Mars terraforming, and human gene editing. After writing and thoroughly editing the forums ourselves, we then reached out to professors who had experience in the fields our forums covered. For the engineering mosquito forum, we contacted ----------, who reviewed the material and made corrections. We did the same with the Martian colonization forum, reaching out to ------------. The entire BU wetlab team contributed to editing and revising the forums until we had a product that was ready for testing
On September 14th, we tested our forums for the first time on a students who were taking an introductory class to cell biology at Boston University. After hosting the forum, we then sent them a form to fill out, giving us feedback on how we could improve our forums. ----------------
