Team:IIT-Madras/Public Engagement
The Language Project
When our team members approached the public to talk about synthetic biology and our project we faced an unanticipated barrier. A good number of people were not only unaware of recent developments in the field that make synthetic biology possible; but also could not speak or understand the language, most scientific research is communicated in- English. India is a diverse country with 22 official languages and only 12.18% of the people understand English (2001 census). Synthetic biology is a recent and unique field that can invite several ethical questions and therefore public engagement is of the essence. For effective public involvement, we need the audience to understand the science behind synthetic biology. Hence we decided to design an introductory course on the basics of SynBio in several Indian languages.
But the need for a Language Project ran much deeper, as we soon realised. Science in general- and biology in particular- are relevant to every person. The inquiry of how life came to be and our quest to understand and deal with its elegant complexity must be inclusive and universal. India is a vast country that has never shown a dearth of brilliance and potential. However, most of the times, its inhabitants just...happen to not speak or be comfortable with English. This introductory course on synthetic biology (originally in 9 major languages spoken in India) aimed at lay people of all age groups and all walks of life, is our humble contribution to the ever-growing revolution of bringing science to all.
The languages we’ve made content available on so far are:
Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, and English.
The Language Project
When our team members approached the public to talk about synthetic biology and our project we faced an unanticipated barrier. A good number of people were not only unaware of recent developments in the field that make synthetic biology possible; but also could not speak or understand the language, most scientific research is communicated in- English. India is a diverse country with 22 official languages and only 12.18% of the people understand English (2001 census). Synthetic biology is a recent and unique field that can invite several ethical questions and therefore public engagement is of the essence. For effective public involvement, we need the audience to understand the science behind synthetic biology. Hence we decided to design an introductory course on the basics of SynBio in several Indian languages.
But the need for a Language Project ran much deeper, as we soon realised. Science in general- and biology in particular- are relevant to every person. The inquiry of how life came to be and our quest to understand and deal with its elegant complexity must be inclusive and universal. India is a vast country that has never shown a dearth of brilliance and potential. However, most of the times, its inhabitants just...happen to not speak or be comfortable with English. This introductory course on synthetic biology (originally in 9 major languages spoken in India) aimed at lay people of all age groups and all walks of life, is our humble contribution to the ever-growing revolution of bringing science to all.
The languages we’ve made content available on so far are:
Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, and English.
Research Magazine
The students of iGEM-IIT Madras realized the rising popularity of popular science and decided to venture into this by writing about new and upcoming areas of scientific research. This inspired many of our non-iGEM peers as well and with a sufficient number of articles, we launched a research magazine called ‘Synkranti’ for the students of the Department of Biotechnology of our university. The name derives from Synthetic Biology and Kranti which is a Sanskrit word that means revolution. The first edition of the magazine being initiated by iGEM is a special issue with focus on “synthetic biology”. The magazine consists of the following sections:
Current research
Interviews with professors
Internships
iGEM
Current research
With so many advancements in various fields in science, our popular science writing team comprising of iGEMers and non-iGEMers decided to write articles in the following topics: Car-T cell therapy, Astrocytes, CRISPR
Interviews with professors
The Department of Biotechnology at IIT Madras agreed to support our initiative and thus, we also begun to interview our PIs and other professors that supported this. Our primary PIs spoke to us about their views on synthetic biology and iGEM. They also gave us an overview of the start of their research career and motivation to pursue their current fields of research. We then interviewed other professors about their research and views.
Internships
Student internships are a critical part of our undergraduate research experience in IIT Madras. Many of us visit Indian universities while some also visit other countries to work on exciting projects for 10 weeks. The internship section is a collection of articles and memoirs of summer research projects undertaken by the students.
iGEM
We added an ‘exclusive’ iGEM section in the magazine in order to explain our current project and initiatives like ‘language project’ to our peers. We interviewed our instructor Dr. Anantha Bharathi on synthetic biology and elaborated on our project for this year. The article on Language Project includes a detailed account of work that went behind ‘Language Project’ from drawing images to collaborating and public engagement. We also have an article on Biosecurity from one of our members that attended the session by FBI at the Giant Jamboree 2017.