Postcard Collaboration

One important goal of the iGEM competition is to get attention by the public, and awake people’s interest in a scientific field which plays a very important role in all our everyday lifes: Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology. In order to achieve this, and to spread our ideas and views regarding this topic, the iGEM Team Düsseldorf initialized a postcard campaign. Besides our team and team Düsseldorf, also the teams from Aachen, Bielefeld, Darmstadt, Erlangen, Hannover and Tübingen took part in this campaign. The concept of this campaign was that iGEM Teams from whole Germany design postcards with an important aspect of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology combined with a catchy motif, and exchange them with all the other teams. Now having a large variety of different postcards, the teams distribute them to the public. The aim is to give non-scientists an understanding of Synthetic Biology, what this means, and in which parts of our life it is involved.

We took this great opportunity also to get in direct contact with generally educated people, which are no natural scientists. Distributing the postcards on both campuses of Göttingen, we came in direct dialogue with students of, for instance, economics, medicine, mathematics, law, philosophy, and school teaching. We invited them for discussions about genetically organisms, challenges, risks, and necessities to use GMOs to solve severe problems of our world. Many of them had an approximate idea of biotechnology, but were indeed surprised, that Synthetic Biology might be such a clean and effective alternative to traditional applications. A great example: Although knowing that cheese can be fermented with microbial rennet enzyme, several vegetarians were not aware of the fact that it can only be produced by GMOs. After all, we see that most educated people have idea of it, however, we see that there is still a lot of potential to strengthen the awareness of the importance of Synthetic Biology.

We think that this post card campaign was a big success, because using postcards as a medium, we also reached people with many different educational backgrounds. Furthermore, combining it with engagement work, we reached people directly.