Team:SCUT-China/Policy&Practices/Evaluation

Campus Activity

Since a great number of senior students have large interest in biology, we design activities of this part with a lot of easy understood examples and knowledge to describe synthetic biology. And drug resistance is known but not familiar to them. They asked us so many questions about drug resistance, especially showing their worries about antibiotics abuse in China. We introduced our project to them in the simplest possible terms, and they understood that synthetic biology might be utilized to solve the problems of drug resistance in China. By the way, some students feel excited when learning genetic engineering in university, which was familiar to them in high school learning. They then discuss with us about whether we can create ideal lives.

Public Outreach

No matter what subjects are, only the ones popularize research results to public affect people’s lives. Therefore, we took our projects out of labs to Guangdong Science Center, which is the biggest popular science education base in Asia. The number of people visiting Guangdong Center just during the National day holiday amazingly exceeds 180 thousand. People of all ages are attracted to our exhibition, which is of novel form. A great many visitors were interested in examples we gave, and interestingly some of them even asked whether it means human can fly if we utilize synthetic biology to joint features of birds and human. Besides, they also question us about the security problems of genetically modified food. Except for answering these questions, we also meet some molecular biological specialists bringing their kids to visit. After the visit, they raised some professional questions about our projects and we discussed about the problems we had met in experimental stage, from which we benefited a lot. By the way, we invite visitors to sign on our scroll as support, and fill in our questionnaires about drug resistance for us to know their knowledge about this problem.

Social Media

Because the geographic location of our exhibition is not good enough, there are still a lot of people without access to our projects and synthetic biology. So we need to use internet if we want them be promoted to much more people. To increase the coverage of our propaganda, we cooperated with Biosns. By means of their channel, our information has been reported by over 30 media including 6 listed companys. Among them, Tencent just has Chinese news coverage up to 89.73% and users up to over 1 billion, the number of which is about summation of user number of top three Chinese operators.

Life Science Community

During the process of promoting our projects and synthetic biology, we realized that those people working on biological research are the ones really affecting on development of synthetic biology. Therefore, we hope to discuss with some large biological firms about drug resistance and synthetic biology. We have visited more than 10 biological firms this year, introducing synthetic biology. Finally, we raised interest of 5 firms and got their supports on technology and lab supplies. By the way, Biosns has showed amazing support to us. Using their mail system, we deliver messages about our projects, synthetic biology exhibition and the 10th anniversary of iGEM, to their 500 thousand users. The uninterrupted delivery repeated every 30 seconds until the user read the mail. So we can know from the background data that how many people really know our information.