Template:Groningen/Public Engagement
Public Engagement
The Dutch Biotechnology Conference (22nd May 2018)
This year our iGEM team was fortunate enough to be invited to the Dutch biotechnology conference. On the 22nd of May two members of our iGEM team woke up at the crack of dawn to travel to Ede and attend the conference. The conference opened with a welcome speech, poster presenters could pitch their idea. Most of the pitches were from PhD students, but the Dutch iGEM teams also pitched their idea. Here we also gave a short pitch of our idea. After the introduction we got the opportunity to walk around the congress. We walked by the many company stands and posters, looking for inspiration and collaboration opportunities.This was also a nice moment to talk to the other iGEM teams about how their iGEM was going. The projects were explained and helpful feedback was exchanged. During the day many interesting topics were presented by Phds but also by biotech professionals. In between the talks we presented our poster to people and answered questions. Here we also received lots of useful feedback and pointers from various people who had worked on similar projects. After a long, but fruitful day we returned home with a notebook full of new ideas and many new contacts who were happy to help us with any future problems.
The Dutch Biotechnology Conference (22nd May 2018)
On the 28th of July we went to mall Paddepoel. Here we showed the bacteria on the hands of children after they washed them, and explained what bacteria are. To older people, we explained the possibilities of genetic modification and asked them what they thought of it. A lot of people were very eager to talk to us about it, and we had a lot of insights about how non-academia think about GMOs. We’ve added a few quotes by people who would rather be anonymous.
- I’m most certainly in favor of GMOs! It can be used for the good way, for example to make tomatoes more juicy! People already have a very big influence on the world, such as global warming and plants that go extinct. I think we have two options. We can make this big leap with genetic modification or otherwise we can not survive on this earth.
- I’m myself working to make the world a better place as well. We are with Yworks, which helps pregnant girls in Sri Lanka to build up their future by learning them to read and to write. We try to do this as local as possible, so we go there and we help them on the spot. It may be good for you as well to try to make your project more local. This way you won’t have a big company buying your idea and making a lot of money, but see for a way so that small farmers can use it. We can get each other on Facebook and share each others posts! Together is always better than alone!
- I would like the natural potatoes the best, but as long as there is still hunger, we need to be looking at alternatives.
- I think the question is where it stops. Adjusting some bacteria is fine, and I think changing your sex should be possible as well. But I’m scared that it will be like a ‘create-your-own-baby’ shop. This way rich people can pay a lot and will have very nice babies, but poor people can pay less and will therefore have babies with lower IQ, lower attractiveness and less social skills. I think this will improve the inequality among society, which is really a bad thing.
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