Education

We held a workshop and made a presentation to the students who major in science at Sapporo Kita High School in Hokkaido.

Our Goal

We held some lecture including the following topics.

• What iGEM is and what our activity is.
• Encourage high school students to be interested in iGEM.
• Give correct information of genetic technology.
• Give an oppotunity for them to have opinions about gene recombination.

We showed them some examples of practical applications and discussed about gene recombination and its future.

Classroom during the lecture

Giving a lecture

Survey

STUDENT 1

I had little knowledge about gene recombination. However, taking this lecture, I found that it had a possibility to give our daily lives big benefits.

I hope that we make the risk of gene recombination smaller, and such technology will be used more widely. If more and more people get correct knowledge of gene recombination, it may become more common.

‏STUDENT 2

After this lecture, I got two findings. One is that, in the future, we can put our hope on new technology, like gene recombination, in the field of food and our daily life.

The other is that we have big responsibility in using such new technology because we don’t know the effects of GMO. It’s important to make use of correct knowledge on gene recombination we got today and share it to as many people as possible.

‏STUDENT 3

I agree with using gene recombination. However, I also know it has ethical problems and have only a vague idea for it. Because of this, I can’t decide my opinion about it yet.

We have future tasks; we have to show clearly how GMOs effect environment and human health, and have to make it more safe and evidential.