Team:SHPH-Shanghai/Human Practices
HUMAN PRACTICES
Raising public awareness in China
Our project focuses on the degradation of biofilm, which is a environment pollutant. Given the public nature of it, we found it necessary to call for society attentions for this novel approach of solving the problem. Therefore, we published a series of public articles on the Chinese internet educating the concept of genetic engineering and our project.
On top of that, we wanted to get feedback from our audience. To find out to what extent the general public accepts the idea of using genetic engineered materials and what are some myths about it. By making surveys and analyzing the collected data, we were able to get hold of our current situation regarding society acceptance. According to our data, although the majority have faith in bioengineering, more people do not have correct understanding of it. This fact motivates to go further in human practise to educate more general public.
Teaching High School& Junior School students about iGEM
As an international competition, iGEM centered on the inheritance from generations to generations. Being the first team of our school, we decided to expand our scope to lowerclassmen and the junior high department of our school.
In our program, students are the main concern. According to our survey, as new generations, they are be more likely to accept new clearing techniques, and also can point out some new applications.
In order to popularize our team project and acquire a general idea of what we will have to do after if applying our project it in the real life, we arranged several classes for middle school and high school students. The classes mainly included the iGEM introduction, enzyme introduction, gene-modification techniques and the main purposes of our genetic machine design. The classes began on September 10th, and ended on October 12th.
Out of our expectation, our audience raised several valuable questions, and we found that the influence that would be exerted on the environment was the part that audience took the attention on. One middle school student pointed out that we can furthermore design an apoptosis mechanism in the genetic machine, so that the impacts on environment, although have been already reduced to minimum, can be one-more-step attenuated. Another high school student implied that we can establish a microorganism community that can neutralize the acid produced by the bacteria after the degradation of biofilm. Their ideas really gave us a perspective on how can our product can be improved if it was to apply in the real-life situation.
They were also interested in the topic of where our product can be applied. They showed a huge enthusiasm in using the bacteria solution to clear their portable water tank, and they were excited knowing that this product can be used to clear the bacteria in the daily maintenance of dwelling catheters in the hospital.
In short, we found our project attractive in the process of popularization.