Team:IISc-Bangalore/Public Engagement
Education and Public Engagement
Overview and Motivation
The basis of our project, PhageShift, was rooted in tackling a very real problem that is only now gaining momentum worldwide – antibiotic resistance.
Rather than concocting sketchy real life applications to some ingenious brainwave conceived in a lab, we looked outward for the problem. Indeed, as our Integrated Human Practices page shows, our project was developed with interaction and input from various agencies and stakeholders, after we stumbled across the threats antimicrobial resistance is posing.
Thus, our interactions not only gave us direction vis-a-vis the technical part of the project but also afforded insight into the worldly concerns regarding this. Education and public engagement on antimicrobial resistance and phage therapy was not just another component to our project; it was a necessity arising out of the problems we chose to focus on. Treating it with the importance it deserves, we thus carried out several activities with the dual intention of increasing awareness on antibiotic resistance and initiating a public dialogue on phage therapy.
Crowdfunding
As our idea shaped into a planned project, we began planning on collecting funds for our project. Apart from reaching out to sponsors and other organizations for funds, we also set up a crowdfunding in which we talked about our motivation for the project and highlighted the issues of AMR and how our project PhageShift aimed to improve the conditions which surround phage therapy. To promote our crowdfunding page, we participated in various discussions on social media in an "Ask-me-anything" style. This prompted some fun and wonderful discussions on the various aspects of our project.
We reached out to our institute's alumni as well as members of the general public, and we were extremely grateful to the kindness and belief that people showed in us, as we raised over 3600$ in a span of two months. This constituted a significant percentage of the total funds we raised, and we strived to spend these funds in a thoughtful and transparent manner.
Survey
Before we begin to engage the public, it was important to know the public! An initiative that played a crucial role in our project, the survey formed the basis of many of the subsequent activities that we took up. The survey, its conclusions as well as the influence in the project have been discussed in detail on our Survey page.
Speaking to young minds
The future of the world is in the hands of the youth. Our team members felt that antibiotic resistance, being this concerning a topic, must be something that must be brought to the attention of the youth. Therefore, we set out with quirky and fun presentations to high schools where students and potential scientists were educated on antimicrobial resistance via abuse of antibiotics, ways to tackle AMRs, including nanomaterials and phages, and their potential use in the medical industries and were also given a picture on how careers in science go. They were also encouraged to learn more about synthetic biology and to use opportunities like iGEM High School. Discussions, focussing on the topics of the talk, were conducted after the talk between the students, and even the teachers.
These talks were organized in the following high schools: R.V. Pre University College - Bengaluru, Bhavan's Vidya Mandir - Elamakkara, TKM Centenary Public School - Kollam, Deeksha Center for Learning PU College - Bengaluru, Delhi Public School - Bangalore South, AECS Magnolia Maaruti Public School - Bengaluru. Their infectious enthusiasm and simple yet profound questions left us both motivated in our project, and wondering about how many more minds there were that just needed a small spark in their imagination and creativity that would help them utilise their talents better. We also heard very kind words from the teachers of the schools we visited, who wished us the best in our project and all the activities we undertook to explain antibiotic resistance.
Pamphlet distribution
The need of the hour to tackle antibiotic resistance is better consumer awareness. The World Health Organization in 2015 released the findings of their multi country survey on antibiotic resistance, which shows that even if people have heard of it, there is still widespread misunderstanding of the issue.[1].
To improve the public understanding of the issue, we designed pamphlets explaining antibiotics, its abuse in domestic as well as industrial (medical, agricultural, poultry) spheres, on AMR and alternatives to antibiotics. They were also translated to the local language, Kannada, to broaden their reach. The designs are available in English (Front and Back) and Kannada (Front and Back) for anyone to freely use.
They were then distributed at the Visveswaraya Industrial and Technological Museum, near Cubbon Park (both hotspots of Bangalore city). A poster containing similar information was put up and throughout the day: young and old, staff and visitors alike, were all were given the pamphlets along with generic instructions, such as always completing a course of antibiotics once prescribed, to avoid arbitrary self-dosage of antibiotics and the like.
Both locations are being prime hubs of public activity and are thus also major tourist attractions. We could therefore speak to people of various nationalities who took a keen interest in what we had to say, and even took back multiple copies of the pamphlets to spread awareness back home.
However, the most impactful session the team members had was with around ~80 high school students of a government school, Lokpal Vidya Mandira who were there on an educational field trip. Most of the students were from an underprivileged background and had zero knowledge regarding antibiotics previously; more importantly, they all said that they had left courses of antibiotics midway, because they “would feel better 2-3 days into the course and saw no point in completing it”. More alarmingly, their parents, having no knowledge of this themselves, would egg them on to do this, even force them to, as “tablets are expensive” and they would therefore “always only buy half the number of pills the doctor tells you to, it is enough to get better”.
To say it was an interesting interaction would be an understatement. We understood the conditions that led to the working class to misuse antibiotics - the pills were too expensive and gave an illusion of being cured midway through the course, encouraging them to drop it midway. Also, a general impression of antibiotics being “magical” and “miraculous” “Western medicine” (as opposed to the indigenous medicine) persists among them - possibly a colonial hangover. Due to this, every time they fall sick, they indiscriminately pop an antibiotic with utter faith that it will cure them. This is only worsened by under qualified doctors who, just as indiscriminately, prescribe the drugs.
Thus, not only is the frequency of usage unnecessarily high, the courses are also not completed properly. The conditions are literally tailor-made to foster antimicrobial resistance. Knowledge is the only cure to this malaise of ignorance and fear. The children after listening to us, promised to show their parents and their neighbours the pamphlets, relay what we told them and swore to not misuse antibiotics again.
Moreover, their child-like curiosity prompted many questions about phage therapy and the nature of antibiotic resistance and genetic engineering. We therefore spoke to their teachers about different scholarship schemes offered by the government and institutes for meritorious students. We sincerely hope we could light a spark for science in the minds of those kindred naive that day.
Legal Framework Review
We studied current antibiotic and phage therapy laws and learnt of ways citizens could submit proposals to the government, regarding policy change. India currently has no legislation at all with regard to phage therapy specifically. In fact, the Indian legal framework with respect to therapeutics and pharmaceuticals as a whole, is not very well developed.
Thus, upon extensive analysis and comparison with other policies prevalent in other countries such as Georgia, Russia and Poland, regarding phage therapy, we attempted to draft a proposal to the Department of Health Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. This was under their Grant-In-Aid Scheme. However, to be clear, at no point was the intention to obtain a grant for PhageShift.
However, upon meeting with the Department of Science and Technology, Centre for Policy Research, IISc Bangalore, we came to know that lobbying for such a change in policy would be an extremely long drawn process. As we were not in a position to commit to such a protracted affair, we decided that it would be better to rework our draft for policy change into a scholarly article. We are proud to say that we were drafred a manuscript and submitted it to a journal, and are now awaiting review!
Video series
As a crowdfunded project and as students of an tax-funded institute, we found it compelling to ensure that our project is accessible to each and everyone who wishes to know more about it. The essence of a project lies in its details, where even the most persevering can get lost due to difficulties in following the technical terms. With this motivation as well as making simple introductory videos on bacteriophages, we created a 5 part mini series and made it available on YouTube under a Creative Commons license. The short videos are on topics like "Introduction to Bacteriophages","Antibiotic Resistance", "Genetic Recombination", "Plaque Assay" and "T4 injection mechanism", which we thought would be highly useful in understanding our project. The first of the 5 part series is available here.
Our interview with Dr. Nirmala and Dr. Abhishek which helped develop PAIR are also publicly available on our Youtube channel.
Poster Presentation
As organizers of the All India iGEM meetup, we decided to keep the final poster presentation session open to everyone. The aim was to engage people on what iGEM is, what projects undergraduates work on, as well as provide teams with an opportunity to explain their project to a large audience with varying background knowledge, to replicate a Jamboree like environment.
In the open-to-all Research Showcase, we interacted with young school children and answered their questions on whether phage is the hero and bacteria is the villain, as well as answered accomplished researchers on what our control for the experiment was!
Resistance - Tales from a Post Antibiotic World
It was essential that one realises antibiotic resistance is a real problem with real consequences and that it can disrupt our daily life, in more ways than we know, quicker than we can imagine. What better way than to write an anthology of fictional stories, set in a post-antibiotic world?
Books are a uniquely portable magic, said Stephen King. To weave the same around a seemingly dreary topic, we compiled a series of 7 short stories, themed around a post antibiotic era dystopia.
These were written, collated and edited completely by our team members. The preface has been written by Dr. Dipshikha Chakravortty, celebrated microbiologist, Centre for Infectious Diseases Research, IISc Bangalore. The collection is to be called ‘Resistance - Tales from a Post-Antibiotic World’ and it will be published soon by the IISc Press.
In line with our commitment to ensure that our work has the maximum impact on society, we plan to make the book freely available in libraries including our own Institute's JRD Tata Memorial Library.