Difference between revisions of "Team:CLSB-UK/Engagement"

Human Practices

Synthetic biology is about more than just slaving away in labs, mixing together tiny amounts of colourless liquids. In particular, our project lends itself well to making an impact on the wider public. Addressing such an important issue as the global energy crisis is a cause worthy of public engagement, which we indeed strived for over the course of the project. It turns out that countless hours spent talking to parents of students at school, writing articles for the school newspaper and presenting talks about our project were not wasted. Mr Zivanic’s Twitter prowess and Jake’s endlessly enthusiastic rambling about our project did not go unnoticed, and by the time Jamboree came around students, teachers and parents alike were engaging with members of our team all the time, asking probing questions about where our money was going as well as raising some of the more serious ethical and moral issues surrounding synthetic biology. Science is meant to be shared with the public and made accessible to everyone, and we believe we have succeeded in this with the human practices side of our project.

We approached our public engagement in three ways. Firstly, we carried out an education event, in which we opened up our project and selected members of our team to talk about iGEM, both in general and specifically regarding our project. This was a tremendous experience for all involved and it gave us the chance to talk to the general public, engage with their questions and in some cases fears about the project and genetic modification as a whole.

Figure 1. Jake talking to members of the public about our project, what can be achieved with synthetic biology even in limited amounts of time and why this field is extremely safe.

Secondly, we wrote several articles for our school student newspaper. These can be seen on our school's archive here, and through this we sought to make genetic modification, normally a fairly forbidding topic, more accessible to the general public.

Figure 2. Our article announcing the project to the school and briefly outlining what we will be doing.

Figure 3. Follow-up article, focussing on synthetic biology as a field.

Finally, we developed a board game through which the principles of iGEM were turned into a (hopefully) accessible and fun game for people to enjoy.

Future projects

As trailblazers for our school, we were forced to learn a lot of things very quickly, and many of the errors made by us could have easily been avoided with the benefit of hindsight. As a result, this has made very clear to us how important it is for us to provide advice to the following teams from our school. Through our public outreach, articles, education events, and our new iGEM game, we have attempted to distil down the essential information in an easier to understand medium. THrough this, we are setting up a framework through which future teams can draw from for help and advice, and we also hope this will see greater uptake amongst high schools in the UK for the iGEM competition, there being very few currently.