How did Imperial implement this protocol?

Science Museum Surveys: We traveled to the Science Museum as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to get feedback on how much people know about biotechnology and the implications of our project. We performed these surveys over a 3 week period. We originally designed paper surveys and spoke to people directly. We found this approach cumbersome and inefficient. To improve, we decided that all future surveys will use electronic media (iPads, etc.). Additionally, our initial survey designs testing knowledge were yes/no questions asking whether participants were aware of the meaning of a specific term in biotechnology. These initial survey questions were not only long in length (30+ questions), they were uninformative on how much the participants actually knew about biotechnology. We decided on asking fewer, but harder and more open-ended multiple choice questions. This complete overhaul in survey design came as many participants questioned us on both the method of delivery of the survey as well as the content of the surveys.

Art Exhibition: After determining that level of knowledge had no impact on opinions about GMOs, we recognized that it was important to emphasize other societal aspects of synthetic biology rather than explaining how synthetic biology systems work. Hence, we decided not to focus on outreach that involved explaining the function of our system but rather explaining our system implications on our society and our world. Hence, we contacted artists with whom we shared common views about patterning, its emergency and its role in living systems in order to comission pieces of art related with these topics. We hope that viewers of the art exhibition will view life as we know it as a result of patterns our system could potential reproduce. By characterizing our audiences better through the use of surveys, we are able to design communications that better resonate with our audiences.

Socio-ethics discussion: As previously mentioned, our primary goal with outreach is to explain our system in context of society. Our project, and much of synthetic biology in general, is all about the idea of being able to control life. Widespread use of synthetic biology will likely hinge upon public perception of the nature of this control. Hence the need to receive public feedback on both the level of control we as a society want to have over life as well as the level of control over the potential applications of synthetic biology systems. By hosting a socio-ethics discussion, we were able to gather public concerns from different cultural, economic and social backgrounds and thus gain a more nuanced perspective on the sociological effects of technological innovation. The conclusions we drew from the socio-ethics discussion will be paramount to shape future outreach.

Board Game: We developed this board game as an outreach method at New Scientist Live! Fair. We recognized that the fair has been marketed to mostly children and teenagers. Hence the most appropriate outreach effort is one that aims to educate key concepts and get the children or teenagers to be interested in the subject so that they learn more. We designed a board game that aims to teach simple but key concepts in synthetic biology, such as the idea of metabolic burden, the roles of genes in cell physiology as well as the modularity present in synthetic biology. Unfortunately, we did not anticipate that our booth at New Scientist Live! was far too small to set up a board game. Reflecting on this, we have decided to make a printable version of this board game so that educators can easily access, download, print and use our board game to teach synthetic biology.

Fairs: We attended two fairs, the first being New Scientist Live! and the second being Fresher's Fair at Imperial College. At New Scientist, we expected children and teenagers to be our main target audience. We designed a simple poster that illustrates how our system works in a very simple way and displays applications that younger audiences can understand. For teenagers we also created a "molecular biology cheatsheet" which not only serves as outreach for our project, but also a quick revision guide for their upcoming GCSE, As and A level examinations. At Fresher's Fair our main target audience are the new upcoming cohort of Imperial students, as well as returning students. As incoming students should know as much as the teenagers at New Scientist Live! we reused most of the outreach materials and also persuaded them to come to our seminars and socio-ethics discussion.

Integrated Human Practices and Consultations: Synthetic biology is a highly interdisciplinary field that requires the expertise of multiple different fields of science and engineering. This often means bringing in expertise that may have no background knowledge of synthetic biology. In particular, a large chunk of our project involves electro-chemistry, a field no one on our team, supervisors included, can claim any understanding in. Likewise, not many electro-chemists can claim to have expertise in synthetic biology. Bridging the gap between these two fields is an endeavor that required explaining experimental results as simply but also in a manner that can bring proper discussion on how the system works. We tried a variety of methods to court our electro-chemists, we started by invited scientists and engineers outside of the Synthetic Biology Centre at Imperial to our departmental seminars and tried to actively engage them during discussion sessions. Through these discussions we all gained a rudimentary understanding of our respective fields and this enabled further and more personal discussion outside of these departmental seminars that were crucial to the success of our experimental set-up.

Changelog

Version 1.0: Sci-comm guide implemented (June 30th)
Version 1.1: Based on feedback from KUAS-Korea iGEM, we've added examples, visual detail and also made minor edits to parts pertaining to industry as well as correcting minor grammatical and spelling mistakes. (August 31st)

Sources