Team:UIUC Illinois/Public Engagement
To reach our community in a positive and meaningful way we decided to partner with the Institute of Genomic Biology(IGB) to present at “ Science Cafe”. Science Cafe has been an event sponsored by the the IGB every few months to individuals in the community. It is a free event hosted by a local small businesses to try and educate community members on differing scientific topics. Usually the event is reserved for graduate students and professors, but UIUC’s iGEM team was invited to talk this year. Our presentation was about our iGEMproject, but also about the principles of synthetic biology and its many uses. We focused most of our presentation on educating the general public on what synthetic biology really is, because many people are unaware of what it is or have misconceptions about it. During our questions and answers time we were able to talk to several people about their concerns with synthetic biology. We talked about the need for biodegradable plastics and how synthetic biology could change our view of life and science. We were able to educate and discuss the perceived problems of synthetic biology with the community and hopefully reduce the negative connotation that surrounds it.
We wanted to do the science cafe because we wanted to talk with those who were not familiar with the concept of synthetic biology, but were interested in the science and learning more about it. As we were answering people's questions, we learned that many have misconceptions about what synthetic biology really is about. We realized that more effort should be spent educating the general public, and not just the scientific community about the field and how applications of synthetic biology would not harm but could help in many ways. We hope that through our talk that we cleared up some of the misconceptions people had and that they learned something new and will be willing to come back to learn more.