Team:BostonU/HP/Gold
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 ethics discussion. We enjoyed writing the forum from scratch and we were happy with its the success of its implementation with Summer Pathways.
We designed two distinct forums for our integrated human practices. The first focussed on Martian Terraforming. The second forum dealt with engineering mosquitos to combat malaria. We aimed for the highest quality of information in our forums, and thus we reached out to experts in the field. While it was difficult to find an expert in Martian Terraforming (and those we could find were on sabbatical), we did consult an expert on genetically modifying mosquitoes. That expert was Andie Smidler, a PhD student of George Church and Flaminia Catteruccia. She reviewed our work and helped us maintain the scientific integrity of the research while also presenting the material in an approachable way.
On September 14th, we tested our forums for the first time on biomedical engineering student at Boston University. To pair with their curriculum, we administered our genetically engineered mosquitoes forum. We were able to generate a wonderful discussion about the long term effects of genetic engineering and concerns about ecological disruption. We were also able to begin generating discussions over CRISPR and ownership, a hot button contemporary topic. In addition we have been approached by Boston Arts Academy to administer our forums.
