Best Education & Public Engagement
Special Prize
Lecture Series
The iGEM competition is primarily about research, but public relations work is also a very large component.
The biggest problem of synthetic biology is that even though it is a big player on the market, it seems like only a drop of information has leaked to the public.
This lack of knowledge leads to fears on all sides. Society seems to be mainly aware of possible risks and over the top doomsday scenarios that probably originated from genetic engineering discussions going south and overblown and over budgeted Hollywood movies. However, scientists fear the restriction their work will suffer due to new regulations that might be implemented.
We think that an open and fact-based discussion can be very helpful for this issue. By educating the public, the advantages synthetic biology could bring can be shown to them. Also, there are a lot of things that still need to be discussed like the improvement of security and safety of the environment.
Therefore, we have made it our mission to inform everyone who is willing to learn about the topic of synthetic life sciences and genetic engineering. With a total of 4 lectures the topic was critically questioned and illuminated from different perspectives. Our goal was to sensitize the population to important and topical issues and help them to distinguish between truth and lies.
At the beginning of each lecture, we captured the general mood about the upcoming aspect of synthetic biology with a few questions. After the lecture, we asked the same questions again to analyze whether the lecture changed the opinion of the audience.
The first lecture was presented by our advisor Tim Blomeier and offered the audience a good overview of the field of synthetic biology.
On June 5 Nicolas Schmelling, also one of our advisors, dealt with the various fields of application of genetic engineering in agriculture in more detail. He compared conventional breeding with genetic engineering methods used today and clarified the various definitions of synthetic biology, genetic engineering and breeding.
The third lecture was given by Dr. Christian Dumpitak and was titled in german: “Ich mach mir die Welt widdewidde wie sie mir gefällt.!? ...und was ELSA dazu sagt: Perspektiven auf Synthetische Lebenswissenschaften”. Dr. Dumpitak started his lecture by discussing aspects of the short movie “Who are the engineers of the future?” by Christina Agapakis & Patrik Boyle (Ginkgo Bioworks), USA 2010. After a short discussion, he gave us an introduction to the history of genetic engineering, its legal regulations and how it can be distinguished from synthetic life sciences. “ELSA” (or “ELSI”) stands for “Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects (or Implications)“ and is a concomitant research in modern life sciences. In the light of ELSA, he discussed potentials, risks and ethical views on synthetic life sciences.
The last lecture on 03.07. was given by our PI Dr. Ilka Axmann. She focused on genetic engineering methods that are currently used in microbiology. Her talk started with simple information about synthetic biology to help build a basic understanding. After that the newly obtained knowledge was applied to everyday objects, where the audience - with some help of PI Ilka Axmann - had to guess just how much genetic engineering has already influenced everyday life.
For us it is very important to give all interested people the chance to think about all possible aspects of synthetic life sciences. In this context it was a desire for us to be available for all questions after each presentation. Offering pizza and beverages many listeners came to us with interesting questions and discussion topics, which we had fun talking about in a small group.
The results of our surveys show that there are still some concerns and prejudices against synthetic life sciences among the population. Some listeners were surprised and sometimes shocked as to which methods can be used in today's agriculture and which safe methods are prohibited due to ethical concerns. As feedback it was often a relief to know more about the topic and to understand the background better.
Survey
Furthermore, we surveyed the listeners before and after each lecture in order to get a general overview of the opinion on synthetic biology. As can be seen from Fig. 1, 84% of the participants have regularly dealt with synthetic biology previously, 16% have dealt with it only now and then and none of the audience have never dealt with it at all.
It becomes clear that our lecture series initially addressed only people who have dealt with the topic before, so it can be assumed that they are no strangers to the topic.
However, 50% of participants thought that synthetic biology has little or no impact on our daily lives (Figure 2). A balance arises in this question though as the other 50% of respondents disagree and are of the opinion that synthetic biology does have an impact on our everyday lives.
One of the most interesting questions asked how much synthetic biology will change our lives has also been answered very interestingly (Figure 4), and it is particularly noteworthy that 31% have a negative view of establishing newly developed products or processes. For our lecture series this means that we not only had supporters in the audience, but also critics.
In the end it was asked if the participants will now deal more with the topic. More than 67% believe that they will continue to do so on a regular basis and 33% will do so more often (Figure 2).
Giving Everybody a Chance
It is very important for us to give everyone the chance to take a look at the synthetic life sciences and perhaps inspire them to dive deep into the field. We believe that science should be freely accessible to everyone. Everybody should be able to expand their knowledge and expertise and should have the chance to contribute to their favored scientific discipline, regardless of their financial background or country of origin.
Since this vision is not yet reality, we tried to contribute a small part to this enormous challenge. The Heinrich Heine University offers many programs for refugees who are currently not able to access science. We turned to participants of German courses and the so-called "Sprachbuddy" program and invited them for a discussion and experiment session.
In a comfortably sized group with people from Syria and Iran, we started out by giving a rough overview of the synthetic life sciences and introducing them to the iGEM competition in German. We were impressed by their language skills as all of them already spoke and understood German quite well. We only had to explain a few key words.
Our guests expressed great interest and many questions came up, which we answered with pleasure. After the discussion a small but interesting experiment followed. With normal household utensils we extracted DNA from a pepper. Everyone was amazed when they saw the extracted DNA in front of their eyes and even we, who work with DNA every day, were impressed.
In the end we gave a tour through our laboratories. All the unknown equipment and samples in the incubators looked very strange to them at first, but after some explanations everyone was excited to learn more. The light cabinets in which we cultivate the cyanobacteria found a lot of admiration.
All in all, not only did our guests learn a lot from us but we also learned from them. They were highly motivated to continue their work or their studies after coming to Germany. We are very happy to be able to give them an insight into our work and wish them the best of luck for their future.
Heine meets Huxley
On July 16 we took part in the first event of “Heine meets Huxley” - a project brought into the world by the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf based on the dystopian novel “Brave New World” written by Aldous Huxley.
During the introductional event “Brave New World - cloned babies and super plants” aspects of genetic engineering were introduced and discussed which was a great opportunity for us to educate people about iGEM, synthetic biology and to still unfounded fears.
In his novel Huxley describes an dystopian world in 2540, where cloned babies are being genetically modified and assigned into classes based on their intelligence and labor.
Written in 1931 and published a year after, Huxley expected huge scientific advances in future society but also a large number of sinister applications for them.
Already in the first chapter - which was read out to the filled room - we were introduced to a world of artificial wombs, excessive cloning and the manipulation of intelligence through different oxygen concentrations given to fetuses determining their future social class. A quite disturbing beginning.
The first talk given by Prof. Dr. Maria von Korff Schmising underlined different methods of genetic modifications used in plants and the effects - a bigger variety in foods - on the market.
After that Prof. Dr. Jan-Steffen Krüssel explained how in vitro fertilization works nowadays and gave information about where Huxley had been wrong: For example, using less oxygen is not correlated with lesser intelligence but rather a natural environment in the oviduct of women.
Next, it was our turn. We prepared information booths on four topics: green biotechnology - the genetic manipulation of plants; red biotechnology - advances in medical fields through synthetic biology; white biotechnology - genetic engineering used in the bio industry and CRISPR/Cas - a new technique in genetic engineering.
At each booth we arranged an informational video and a quiz about each topic to test our visitors’ knowledge about each topic.
After realizing that they often had no idea what products are made by genetically modified organisms, people were shown everyday examples, such as detergents with enzymes, foods with added protein and vitamins produced by microorganisms, to demonstrate the importance of synthetic biology in our everyday life. The spectators often weren’t aware and were surprised they had been using products of genetically engineered bacteria all along!
We also gave them several items for comparison, such as rennet cheese with naturally and synthetically produced enzymes, to let visitors decide which they liked best. Surprise: they liked both.
The green biotechnology booth introduced the people to the concept of Golden rice in comparison to normal rice.
For the red biotechnology booth we showed an exhibit of a pig pancreas and were able to explain that this had been used for insulin production a long time ago, whereas the production nowadays is a lot faster and less cruel. The visitors were relieved that the amount of animals we raised for medical purposes had been reduced by such technologies.
In the end one question stood out: “Why do you think the society is afraid of genetic engineering and synthetic biology even though there are so many advantages?”
We realized this fear usually develops from the lack of information about procedures, methods, laws and utilizations.
When given those information, a lot of sceptical people suddenly began to understand the advantages of synthetic biology and started to abandon unrealistic fears.
´March for Science´ Cologne
On the 22nd April of 2018 our team participated in the ´March for Science Germany´ in Cologne.
Every year hundreds of thousands of people worldwide demonstrate for free and unrepressed scientific research as well as evidence based policy. It is also used as a way to communicate with the public which otherwise has little to no contact to science in general. This interaction is important though in order to create a positive picture of science in the public.
Our team met at the Domplatte in Cologne at 11 am and together with the iGEM teams from Bielefeld, Bonn and Aachen as well as hundreds of other (non-iGEM) participants marched
At the Rudolfsplatz a lot of speeches and talks from a variety of journalists, physicists and biologists, like Ranga Yogeshwar and Mark Benecke were given. We discussed fakes news and biased data of governmental proclamations as well as the repression of scientific work. An additional important aspect was the responsibility of the scientific community in representing themselves to the general public. Therefore the work of science journalists is very important for public relations. Some of the speeches picked out the working conditions of German scientists regarding permanent employment and resulting problems in life balance and family planning.
The speeches at the event were very informative and showed how important it is to be well received by the public. This event was the reason why our team decided to put more effort into public relations.
