The importance of informing and becoming informed has from the beginning of the project been a priority.
We have from the early stages of working on our project been focused on informing and sharing our knowledge with society and raising a public awareness of our project topic. Our impression of the public understanding concerning the important role of chaperones and protein folding in general is that it seems to be lacking.
This was something we wanted to change. By, to a large extent, focusing on education and to engage the public in events we tried to spread the valuable knowledge that we have gained throughout the project.
Through our collaborations and our integrated human practice we were also given experiences from other iGEM-teams, the public society and different stakeholders.
Read more about our Integrated Human Practice here:
Engineers Without Borders Sweden
By implementing engineering expertise, Engineers Without Borders Sweden is actively trying to solve engineering challenges related to inequality and global challenges.
Engineers without borders Sweden is an organization and an advisory committee at Linköping university.
During the spring, Engineers Without Borders Sweden had a campus tour for secondary school students and the project team of LiU iGEM 2018 was a halt at this tour.
We gave a short lecture about our iGEM project and an introduction to the iGEM-competition.
Summer University - Sommaruniversitet
During three days we supervised laboratory work where groups of secondary school students extracted DNA from a kiwi fruit.
Summer University is an annual event organized by Linköping university where secondary school students get the chance of coming to the university and try scientific experiments and learn about the mechanisms connected to the experiments.
We helped plan the experiment we supervised and by doing so we organized it so that it could be connected to our iGEM-project and synthetic biology in general.
We taught them about protein folding and the importance of these being folded correctly.
By being a part of this event, we got a chance of inspiring these youths to hopefully consider the field of synthetic biology in the future.
Kalasmottagningen
Kalasmottagningen is an organisation convention for new students at Linköping University.
It is a welcoming event organized by Linköping University to welcome all ny attendants to the university and to the student life in Linköping.
Here all new students have the opportunity to become introduced to different student and non-student organisations.
About 8000 people were present at Kalasmottagningen this year and LiU iGEM had a stand on the convention.
Through this event we got the opportunity to introduce LiU iGEM, iGEM and our Synthetic Biology project to all students, organisations and companies that were present at the convention.
TEDx Norrköping
TEDx-events are incredibly popular and it is a great way of spreading a message worldwide.
According to us in LiU iGEM this was a way to both inform and being informed as well.
Through a collaboration with the people in charge of TEDx Norrköping we got the opportunity to both have one of our team members to make a TED-talk.
We also found three other speakers for the event that went well with our theme.
These speakers were Peter Påhlsson, Andreas Eriksson and Jenny Hagenblad.
We also provided the event with pre-recorded TED-talk video proposals.
During the event there were about 70 people in the audience.
A video will also be uploaded to TEDx:s website, then it will hopefully reach many more.
Podcast: Attempting Science
An effective way of update and staying updated is nowadays through podcast.
Throughout the course of our project we have worked on a podcast named “Attempting Science”.
In this we discuss our project but also other interesting subjects related to studies and synthetic biology.
Attempting science was one of many ways for us to involve the public in our project.
By making it public via soundcloud anyone could listen to it, we have also posted about it on out social medias (Instagram and Facebook) to make it reach out as far as possible.
This was a want for us to both update people interested in synthetic biology to become more involved in the subject and out project, but it was also a way for us to reach out to everyone else.
A podcast given a glance is a podcast with a great chance.
