A freelancing journalist, working for the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) heard of the iGEM Team Bielefeld-CeBiTec and came to the CeBiTec in order to interview us about the work in the lab.

On Friday the 10th of October we did an interview on responsible research, innovation and the iGEM competition. A team of students arranges interviews with students, supervisors and other members of the iGEM community in cooperation with the Rathenau Instituut. We got interviewed by Ana Dias, Daan Berbers, and Sven van Ewijk.
First of all we talked about who we are. We spoke about our team and about how we got to our project. Then we were asked with whom we talked already about our project and about biosafety aspects as well as ethical and theological aspects.
A big part of the interview was about what we think of the policy and practice part of the project. We spoke about what we have done so far. A very interesting question was what we personally think is the best way to do policy and practices.
Finally the request was to give an advice for any further participant for iGEM. We think that the best advice for participating at iGEM is to think of something new. Do research in the newspaper and online about everything new, brainstorm as much as possible and try to make a project about it. That is what we did. So for example we were thinking about a project with toads that can sense earthquakes. We found a lot of interesting reasons for this phenomenon which includes the full moon or traces of arsen in the water which could be act as a trigger signal. It is a lot of fun to make inquiries and to consider something crazy.
We want to thank Ana, Daan and Sven for the interview and hope that it will help to get new insights into the iGEM competititon.