Human Practices 2014

Following our concept of the two pronged approach, we wanted to spread the word and allow everyone to access knowledge on the intein tool that we have presented. In order to do this however, we needed to use a basis of understanding about synthetic biology and the work being currently done in the field. The problem? There is no basis of understanding of synthetic biology. What is currently being taught at schools barely even scratches the surface and those who haven’t been in the schooling system lately have no idea whatsoever about the concept. It is this secondary part of the population, the adults, that have a say in what goes on in synthetic biology research and its popularity through their votes and their tax payer dollars. Because of this, there is a large gap in communication between the public and what synthetic biology wants to bring forward. Our goal was to bridge this gap and inform the public about this new field of science.

We decided to attack this problem on multiple levels in order to gain the widest audience possible for this message; grade school, high school, post-secondary and finally the general public. By having this multifaceted approach to our education plan, we were able to not only teach the public of today about the field of synthetic biology, but also future generations as well.

After doing some investigative surveys in downtown Kingston, we discovered that most of the population had no clue about what synthetic biology is, let alone what inteins are. Although there was very little recognition of the term initially, many people showed high interest in the concept after having it explained to them, particularly those with some science background were able to see the plethora of opportunities it offered to the scientific community. We were surprised and delighted of the positive view that the majority of the people we surveyed had on this topic and decided that this would be our stepping stone into our education goals for the populace. Now that we had studied the general public’s take on the topic at hand, we were able to better tailor a plan to introduce not only synthetic biology, but also inteins to the population.

To start off, we decided that education of the public school students would be an important first step to creating increased interest in this field, as well as hopefully inspiring these students to pursue science as a career path. Due to the age range, much of the subject matter was simplified, allowing the learning process to go on through student discovery.

One of our most successful educational initiatives this year has been our partnership with Science Quest, a local non-profit engineering and science based program. This program inspires children between the ages of 9-13 to participate in a series of innovative, hands-on workshops in a broad range of scientific disciplines. In partnership with this group, we created an educational program that wound through the history of DNA, described modern applications of genetic engineering and speculated on the future possibilities of synthetic biology. The children were then given the unique opportunity to isolate DNA from bananas by themselves – an easy but highly visual way of showing kids the hidden world of genetics that’s all around them! The children would often return from this with hundreds of questions about the possibilities of this fascinating field and the limitations of it. Overall, our Science Quest educational program has been a spectacular success, with many children returning to try the workshop a number of times throughout the summer!

Moving up from the public school level, our approach to the high school students was far more focused on the theory behind synthetic biology, the techniques commonly used as well as the huge range of possibilities it covered. We used problem based learning in order to allow the students to make conclusions themselves and learn from the process of scientific discovery.

In order to use the opportunity of working with these students to the maximum, we partnered up with Shad Valley, a well-known Canadian charity that works to empower high achieving high school students. These students attend a month long summer camp at a several university campuses across the nation and attend several workshops throughout their stay are aimed at science, technology, engineering, math and leadership development. We worked with Shad Valley to produce a workshop aimed specifically on synthetic biology and problem solving through real life applications. We presented a forensic case based on synthetic biology, as well as teaching students about common techniques used in the lab and allowed them to crack the case themselves using what they had learned. This hands on method of teaching gave the students the chance to actually get real world experience in the lab, as well as gain an understanding of the scientific process. Many students became highly interested in the depths of opportunities that this field had to offer and began to ask questions on the next steps they could take to become synthetic biologists! We also took this opportunity to inform these students, who by now have had a basic understanding of biochemistry and systems biology, about inteins and our project. We highlighted the sheer amount of possibilities that this system had to offer and the magnitude of its flexibility to adapt to different environments and roles. We were ecstatic to answer all the questions these students had to answer, whether it be about synthetic biology, inteins, opportunities in this field and many more.

At the end of the workshop we gave all the students who participated a survey in order to better gage how we did at educating them on synthetic biology. The result? 100% of the students found the workshop highly engaging, highly informative and would definitely come back for more workshops. In conclusion, the Shad Valley initiative was quite successful and yielded much personal satisfaction for the students as well as the QGEM members running the workshop.

As we progressed into the post-secondary category, we decided to analyse how we would want to see synthetic biology presented at our age level and interest rates and decided that the most effective way of spreading the word on this new field was through a hands on learning course.

Introductory Molecular Biology at Queen’s University

As part of our campaign to create innovative educational workshops for each stage of learning, our team has collaborated with professors here at Queen’s University to start thinking differently about how we teach and learn about synthetic biology. In the introductory molecular biology class taken by over 700 students, members of the QGEM team will be responsible for creating innovative problem-based learning tutorials in which students will be challenged by a set of problems that need to be solved through the creative use of synthetic biology techniques such as PCR, CRISPR-Cas systems and DNA recombination.

In addition, QGEM members will be guiding “spotlight” lectures interspersed throughout the semester. In these lectures, students will be given the opportunity to explore the cutting edge of specific questions of interest to modern scientists, the local research being done to answer these questions and the latest technology being used to probe deeper into these questions. By directly introducing synthetic biology to students at the sophomore level, we can grow a generation of scientists who have been immersed in a culture of problem-solving and collaboration from a very early stage in their scientific careers.

And finally, in order to get in touch with the general public, we needed to analyse what the most common method of information transfer was in today’s day and age, television. In order to get synthetic biology into the minds of the people that we were targeting we needed to get media attention beyond the social media that we had been using previously. The television broadcast platform allowed us to access a larger audience and inform them of our project and what the future has in store for synthetic biology, but at the same time, we needed a well-known public figure to give us a level of legitimacy with the public that we could not earn on our own with such a large population.

Ted Hsu

This summer we got in touch with our local member of parliament, Ted Hsu. Ted is a physicist and the liberal party’s critic for science and technology. We talked to him about synthetic biology and the controversial but promising nature of the field piqued his interest. He invited us to do a feature on his show, and we discussed the importance of knowledge translation and open discussion in ensuring novel technologies meet the needs of everyday people. We were aired in September and reached 8000-10000 Kingston residents over 442 minutes of screentime, helping raise awareness about iGEM and the burgeoning field of synthetic biology.

Overall, we believe that this multifaceted approach allowed us to access a diverse population and provide age appropriate education about synthetic biology and inteins, as well as presenting to the public the vast amount of possibilities that this field has to offer to not only the scientific community, but also the world community.