Public Engagement

Introduction

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Maksim-a cute, little piglet lived a very joyful life in his farm in Brittany. Every day was a perfect day on this farm, as all the animals were happy, healthy and lived amidst beautiful surroundings.

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But one day, Maksim’s smile vanished. Over the next few days, he started losing his appetite and slowly his energy. Little Maksim looked so unwell that the farmers called the veterinarian.

The veterinarian ran some tests and upon diagnosis, it was found that Maksim was infected by a multi drug resistant Colibacillus, which could prove fatal for him!

Poor Maksim!

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Hearing this story, Paris Bettencourt iGEM team jumped into action!

They wanted to save Maksim and to do so they need everyone’s aid!

Maksim the piglet VR experience

Multidrug resistance is a crisis plaguing both developed and developing nations and to create awareness among people, we developed our very own “Maksim-the Piglet”.

It is an interactive VR game experience, aimed to generate curiosity as well as educate the masses.

To make the VR experience realistic, logistically, the game was set-up inside a container, divided two parts- one half displays the work carried out at Institut Cochin by our iGEM team and the second half, contained a pen for our piglet Maksim, where the attendees could hear poor Maksim suffer as a result of the illness.

The audience is briefly introduced to the concept of antibiotic resistance- our role as iGEMERs to design other alternatives to antibiotics and their role as judicious users of antibiotics. Thereafter, the attendees are invited to wear a “full body lab suit”. Followed by providing them with arsenals the “pipette-guns”, we shrink to them to “microscale” and where they enter Maksim’s colon.

This is where the fight would begin to save our poor baby Maksim from this fatal infection!

Like all mammals, piglet’s like Makism is inhabited by millions of bacteria both good and bad. Thus, each player has to avoid killing the good bacteria found in Maksim’s colon.

The winning strategy is use antibiotics sufficiently to cure the infection and not indiscriminately. As overuse of antibiotics causes the population of resistant pathogenic bacteria to thrive and thus, making antibiotics inefficient.

Making our dream Maksim - the Piglet

• Creating Maksim-the Piglet has been quite an emotional and inspiring journey for us, and we started from scratch with the help of Gamelab and VR Lab housed at CRI in Paris.

• The VR experience was constructed using Unity for the HTC Vive hardware.

• We added the special sound effects of samples recorded in our lab to really immerse the audience in the ambience of a wetlab (See iGEM Bettencourt Paris- Music Makers).

• The key figure behind the game is our developer and game-designer Mourdjen Bari, and Philippe Llerena and the Gamelab CRI provided the logistical resources.

iGEM Bettencourt Paris- Music Makers

Music has been an integral part of our iGEM journey and has always surrounded us to boost our moral and enthusiasm. It has helped us through long and tedious nights of experiments, especially, electronic music and instruments of the lab perfectly synchronized with each other.

Thus, we created our one of the kind “MUSIC BRICKS” and recorded them using music software.

Adrien Husson, an electronic engineer and our neighbor of Makerlab provided us with an unused Novation Launchpad. This apparatus became a platform for music creation and composition and discovery, thus making us all Beethoven of this century!

Finally, these musical snippets became part of the background sounds of our game- Maksim-the Piglet.

Music Bricks

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Other supporters and people behind Maksim-the Piglet

Before our exhibition at Biodesign Here Now in London, UK, we encountered some hurdles as the VR set-up from CRI was unavailable.

So we looked elsewhere to lends us a VR set-up! Our rigorous and through search led us to Francois-Xavier ,

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from Sparkling VR Paris, who not only lent us their installation but also invited us to develop our game at their complex whenever needed. We received love and support from them!

Our game was further ameliorated by the creativity strokes of the 3D artist Salamiden, who designed our fantastic, real-looking antibiotic-pipette guns and the bacterial cells.

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Sylvie Harding, at Shepherd’s Bush during London Design Week, also helped us to re-create a farm in our shipping container.

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At London Design Week, we met Wim Van Eck, a researcher-cum-artist who works on biological 3D modeling. His artistic process involves growing bacteria and fungi on Petri dishes, scanning them and building a height-field to displace a 3D grid object to create a 3D terrain. He extended his support to design better graphics to represent the colon of Maksim and make it more realistic!

Showcasing “Maksim - the Piglet”

To engage people and to get their feedback, we selected three exhibitions, where we found ample amount of space and support to demonstrate “Maksim - the Piglet”.

• London Design Festival : Biodesign Here Now 2018

Over the course of iGEM, we contact several companies including Cell Free for experimental aid. Incidentally, its founders Helene Steiner and Thomas Meany run a biotech village made from shipping containers in Shepherd’s Bush Market in London, UK.

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The uniqueness of using shipping containers to create our VR experience was intriguing thus, we took the opportunity to showcase our game first time to a general audience during London Design Week for the Biodesign Here Now festival in September 2018.

This is where the audience was able to test our game for the first time and we could evaluate their knowledge of use of antibiotics and spread of antibiotic resistant bugs.

The exhibition at London had been an exceptional and inspiring event where we had the chance to meet scientists, entrepreneurs and designers from all over the world, and also people who are just fascinated by science.

• Nuit Blanche, 17th edition

Nuit Blanche is an yearly event in Paris (but also in other European cities), when museums and monuments open their doors to the general public to see their installations, artistic performances and other shows on diverse themes.

At the new renovated CRI campus, we showcased our work this year, where we spent the night meeting people and demonstrating our VR game.

• La fête de la Science

Another very popular event in France where during one day scientists present their projects to a general audience.

For this occasion, we yet again exhibited “Maksim-the Piglet” to public at CRI.

Finally, these two additional and enriching events gave us a platform to discuss our project and sensitize people about problems of antibiotic resistance.

Results of our surveys

Solving the antibiotic resistance crisis requires bringing in the consumers, policy makers and drug-developers together. We found that our portal “Maksim - the Piglet” is a excellent means of improving the general awareness of people of different spheres.

We observed that cultural differences also played a role in the response given by public; one finds different reactions to VR, while the English are amazed, the French are more critical.

In the end, we have accumulated data from over 100 people, who tested our game and filled out our before/after questionnaires.

Given our success at La fête de la Science, we have further been invited to participate in the “Microbiote intestin Exposition” to be organized at “Cité des sciences” in Paris in December 2018.

Take a look at the results so far,

Other public interactions

• Lab Olympics

iGEM is a grand pedestal to demonstrate the value of science and research to lay man, and we took every opportunity to communicate with people from all walks of life.

We as iGEMERs aim is to bring children of all ages closer to the world of researcher and expose them to scientific thinking. At Lab Olympics-one such forum, we set-up a series of games for the public -including, serial dilution, usage of eppendorfs, etc.

Seeing is believing, so for the audience, we tested the killing activity of a common antibiotic Ampicillin on a soil-inhabiting non-pathogenic bacteria, Bacillus subtilis.

Performing these experiments in public, showed the attendees how concentrations of antibiotics, either could be fatal or not to the bacteria and how resistance originates.

Achievements

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• Development of the interactive VR experience : Maksim the piglet
• Maksim the piglet VR experience showcased at Biodesign Here Now, London, Nuit Blanche, Paris and at the Fete de la Science, Paris
• Lab Olypics