Team:Valencia UPV/Public Engagement
Overview
Synthetic Biology achievements and challenges have only real sense taking into account the effect it has on the improvement of nowadays issues. However, it is also one of the most controversial scientific fields for the public opinion.
Generally, the presence of misconceptions in regard to genetic engineering makes it difficult to reach to the general public . Moreover, access to SynBio is currently hampered by several barriers, such as the extensive background knowledge.
Thus, with Printeria we want to break the social and technological barriers that prevent people from coming into Synthetic Biology. In this context, our Education and Public Engagement work has the aim of divulgating SynBio through different social targets, so that misinformation is beated in favour of the critical thinking.
Bio Art: living masterpieces
“To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” - Leonardo da Vinci
Art exists since the origins of humanity. Likewise, science has always been prompted by a desire of knowing more and more about the world, the nature and life.
One of our main concerns is to demonstrate the existant synergy between art and life sciences. This is nowadays called Bio Art : a contemporary art form that adapts scientific methods and biotechnology to explore living systems as artistic subjects.(1)
Activity: Bioartists for one day
How to attract people to SynBio? It is possible to achieve this challenge in a subjective and eye-appealing way? We thought it should be possible, so we designed the didactic practical session ‘Bioartist for one day’.
The activity took place in the Mustang Art Gallery (Elche), a cultural space dedicated to the diffusion of contemporary art. This workshop involved last year high school students of arts, science and social sciences, so we could interact with a wide range of different profiles.
In this activity, they created their own ‘living masterpice’. Previously, we did detailed explanation on how to properly use the lab material and cells during simple microbiology protocols such as plating. Then, using solid agar plates as a canvas, inoculating loops as brushes and a palette of pigmented bacteria we self-made in the lab as tempera, they blew their minds to do imaginative Microbial Art. As soon as they finished, petri dishes were collected, kept and sealed for a later incubation in our lab.
We also thought that, in the network era, students could be a great help in the promotion of SynBio by simple talking about their experiences with their friends, so we created the Instagram hashtag #MAGPRINTERIA to encourage them to share pics, messages and impressions.
Future generations
High school students are eager to know more about the world they live in. However, students rarely learn about Synthetic Biology inside classrooms. As there is a lack of hand-on STEM curricula, basic concepts such as gene, DNA and bacteria are only explained theoretically. In order to stimulate young people to be curious about science and to promote the critical thinking on scientific foundations, we believe this educational approach needs to be changed.
Activity
To do so, we gave some talks to several high school classes, in which we talked about:
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iGEM and SynBio as a multidisciplinary research field
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Bacteria: enemies or friends?
We wanted to beat the stigma against bacteria, explaining their importance and benefits, not only naturally (i.e.: they form our microbiote and they are the base of the trophic chains), but also in biotechnology (i.e.: bacteria as biofactories for medicine, industry, etc.)
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Printeria: how it really works?
As SynBio is not only about biology, we thought it was also highly important to demonstrate the role of engineering and electronics. Thus, we decided to explain them, from an educational approch, the basis of Printeria: our software and how the digital microfluidic system allows us to control each biotech process with high accuracy. During the talk, we showed them several videos and photos to ease each explanation and to ensure the youth understanding.
European Research Night
The European Research Night is a wide-public event, promoted under the EU Programme Horizon 2020, whose objective is to to encourage the scientific/technical youth vocations and lay public interest to science. It involves research organizations, science museums and public organizations all around Europe.
Activity
As part of this event the City of Arts and Science, one of the biggest scientific and cultural leisure complexes in Europe, organized a complete program of free access activities, including interactive experiments, scientific monologues and researchers talks. We were invited to be part of this program to present Printeria to a wide range of interested people from all ages, who listened our speech with great interest.
UPV Welcome Fest
UPV_iGEM is part of the Design Factory Global Network. This is a network of universities innovation hubs all around the world, whose mission is to create change in the world of learning through passion-based culture and effective problem solving.
Activity
As part of the UPV Welcome Fest, a Design Factory Exhibition was organized in order to explain the diversity of projects being carried out by the Design Factory teams. There, we had the chance to show Printeria to all the university community and to explain the basic concepts of SynBio to those who didn't know about it.