The ultimate goal of bioengineering projects is implementation. However, in order for any work to leave the lab researchers need approval from policy makers. This year, we partnered with William & Mary Model United Nations to ensure the next generation of domestic policy makers, WHO officials, and international law makers have an understanding of synthetic biology.

To ensure our product and presentation matched the interests and current understanding of the high school students coming to Model United Nations we connected with Ashley Shang the Undersecretary-General for General Assemblies. Ashley coordinates the nearly 1,500 students who attend William & Mary High School Model United Nations. Students come from 60 high schools from across America for the event. In our meeting we determined most of the attendees have taken high school biology, and are familiar with the basics of DNA replication but that gene editing technologies and applications would be new. Fortunately for our team, students participating in Model UN are expected to do substantial research prior to attending the conference. This gave us a unique opportunity to guide student learning before they attended our official presentation. Ashley connected us with Julie Vu who heads the WHO committee and she created a background guide directing students in their research and pushing them to explore synthetic biology topics. This background guide gave us amazing access to our target community.

The structure of Model United Nations includes a background guide which presents the topics for discussion for each committee before they arrive at the conference. This background helps guide student’s research and offers a shared foundational knowledge for all attendees. The background guide also provides information on CRISPR-Cas technology and encourages students to look into bioengineering/biohacking before attending the conference. This guide was distributed to the 150 students in the WHO committee as the first point of contact. Our iGEM team went on to create a synthetic biology presentation which both built on that foundation and introduced advancements and concerns in synthetic biology relevant to legislators such as new medical advancements seeking approval, the regulation of reagents, and the containment of synthetic organisms. We met with Julie and Ashley on October 4th to present our rough draft of the presentation. The presentation was well received and we were given extra time to expand our presentation to include more synbio applications.

We knew we would be presenting to a group of individuals with varying levels of background knowledge, because of this, we wanted to include a presentation as a part of our outreach. However, we were unsure how to create an engaging presentation for a mixed experience audience. For inspiration we turned to the database. During our search we found TUDelft's 2017 TEDX presentation. There was a video of one of their team members giving a presentation. Her presentation style, use of familiar personal stories and pop culture references, and level of sophistication when describing the teams project shaped how we approached our presentation. We modified the presentation time from 10 minutes to 25 minutes and integrated the subjects we felt would be most engaging based on our previous conversations with nursing home staff. We did not however, let the entire outreach event become a presentation. After reviewing several other teams’ projects, namely BostonU's 2016 Building with Biology event, it became evident that facilitating discussions can be an excellent way to increase engagement and promote mutual learning. We chose to make the second half of the program a facilitated discussion using questions adapted from our own Building with Biology Public Forum. This model allowed us to bring everyone up to speed on the science, while also giving the participants a chance to share with us what they knew and thought about synthetic biology. Together reviewing these two past projects solidified our goal of  creating an interactive and educational program which encouraged participants to develop their own opinions about synthetic biology.

We will be presenting our 20 minute presentation, found below, to 150 High School Model United Nations students on Sunday, November 10th. The group will then spend the rest of the day discussing and debating global policy as it relates to DIY biology and bioengineering advancements. This project was designed to put synthetic biology into a global policy context, encouraging students to see the impact of bioengineering. By presenting synthetic biology in this new format we are able to make synthetic biology relevant for a larger portion of the high school population.

You can find the background guide Here - SynBio begins on page 3