Survey About Biotechnology

With this survey we intended to get an overview about what people already know about vitamin B₁₂ and what is their opinion to biotechnology in general.

The responses told us a lot about the knowledge of the people about biotechnology which is still lacking since most people think they rarely use products that are produced biotechnologically. Nevertheless, the majority of people see a high potential in biotechnology and synthetic biology, which includes production of vitamin B₁₂ .

Moreover, even if many people say they eat meat twice or three times a week, many people do not think they use a product that was produced biotechnolgically daily.

Furthermore, it is to mention that most of the participants of the survey were biologists, which may scew some results. Hence, it is important to mention that most people see a high potential of biotechnology in various fields, like diagnostics, food processing and industrial production. An important note is that most people think that biotechnolgy is a very powerful tool but needs to be carefully handled, hinting towards the awarness of new biologists for the consequneces of their work.

Bio&Pretzels

Since 2014, the student council of our faculty organizes so called Bio&Pretzel talks, in a semi-formal atmospherere with beer and pretzels. The speaker, usually a professor or assistant professor, gives insight in his scientific field for a general audience: school students, freshmen of the university, relatives of the students, but also for ongoing scientists themselves. The aim of these talks is to inform the general audience, but also to give insights for ongoing scientists still looking for their scientific profession. Thus, it was a great honor for us as the iGEM team to have this opportunity. We talked about synthetic biology in general and the awesome applications which might be possible in future, and of course the responsibility which comes with it. We also outlined the idea of the iGEM competition, and presented our own topic. We told the audience about the importance of Vitamin B12, from which nutrients it can be uptaken, and how we could improve the efficiency of production with our synporter.

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.