Team:DTU-Denmark/Achievements/Policy and Practices

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Technical University of Denmark

Policy and Practices Initiatives

Introduction

We find communication very interesting and see it as an essential part of a great project….. We have as explained in our outreach strategy chosen to focus on inspiring young talented high school students. After these policy and practices initiatives we have already been contacted by several students from the workshops, finding it interesting looking for more information and supervision on high school assignments. Thats a great achievement, and we are proud to have excited their interest and eager to help these students.

From the beginning we chose to focus on talented high school students. There are many ways to reach them. We have participated in a documentary on biomimetics targeted to these high school students with a special interest within biotechnology and ground-breaking research. We have taken advantage of the great opportunity of Denmark hosting Euroscience Open Forum 2014 (ESOF). This event is especially attracting elite students with interest outside the ordinary high school program, and very much focusing on inspiring these students to learn more about science. We went to ESOF to spread the word about synthetic biology and the great potentials. As our main product we developed a workshop, targeted towards talented high school students. These young people are our future scientist and it have been a great experience working with them.

Conclusively this whole part of the project has been a great. As the project developed we also experienced an increasing interest within synthetic biology and it has been a pleasure to pass this along to new individuals.

Workshop

In accordance with our outreach strategy we developed and held a workshop in cooperation with Academy for Talented Youth. Academy for Talented Youth (ATY) is an initiative for ambitious and talented danish high school students, primarily interested in science, willing to extend their education beyond the ordinary high school lessons.

The focus of the workshop was to inspire the students rather than providing dry facts and heavy information. The idea was to make them aware of the huge potential within synthetic biology, including how synthetic biology can provide solutions to several current global problems.

We initiated the workshop with an introduction to the iGEM competition, synthetic biology and examples on innovative synthetic biology projects partly inspired by previous iGEM projects. The introductory presentations were followed by an idea development exercise, where the students were to pair a global problem with an element from synthetic biology. Prior to the workshop a list of global problems within different categories such as human health, climate and environment and the future increase in population was created along with a list of elements often applied in synthetic biology such as different proteins, organisms and reporters together with a definition of the individual elements. These lists provided the foundation for the first exercise. During the exercise the students were encouraged to add to the lists and to use their knowledge and imagination in order to pair up the problems with solutions.

Some of the examples the students came up with are listed below:
  • Lotion containing lipases against obesity
  • Bacteria emitting light when oxygen level decrease in lakes due to pollution
  • Remedy against loss of hair, hair producing bacteria
  • Bacteria producing D-vitamin. strengthen immune system
  • Trees as lampposts that stop photosynthesis and lighten when it becomes dark.
  • Squared fruit
  • Inverted yeast cells for hangovers
  • Sun filter for the skin containing bacteria producing the active compounds in sun screen.
  • Drug delivery using the technique like primers for a PCR reaction and find specific target DNA.
  • A bandage containing penicillin fungi preventing inflammation.
  • Trees with different colors so painting is no longer necessary.
  • Tasty algae to prevent hunger.
  • Genes from electric eel incorporated bacteria for bio batteries.
  • Algae turning salt water into drinking water.
  • Paper production from bacteria instead of trees.
  • Cells acting as filter to clean salt water.
  • Bacteria producing vitamins.
  • Bacteria degrading nuclear waste
  • Bacteria detecting radioactivity and send out a fluorescence signal when radioactivity is too high.
    • .
The workshop was a huge success and many of the students responded positively to the exercise. Due to the positive feedback on the workshop it was held a second time at a camp for talented secondary school students hosted by Science Talents.

The concept behind the workshop and the material will be passed on to future iGEM teams, to enable them making it a part of their initial idea development. We emphasised this point to the participants that we would save the ideas and pass them on. This worked as a motivation factor.

The talk naturally came across releasing GMO’s in the environment, since many of the ideas that came up included GMO’s used for different purposes where release to the environment would be inevitable. This induced a talk about safety in the lab and the restrictions associated with GMO’s. Take a look at our pages about safety and ethics for more information.

Documentary


Initiatives

Documentary


In order to inspire younger students and pass on our knowledge on synthetic and biology we participated in an educating documentary dealing with biomimetic. The documentary dealt with how fascinating nature is and how many great abilities that can be adopted into new applications. The focus was on how the nature build with building blogs all identical no matter what is build, and how we can apply that in building synthetic nature from for example biobricks. We outlined a couple of inspiring examples from previous iGEM projects to illustrate this. i.a. E. Glowli from Cambridge 2010 team, were bioluminescence from fireflies have been adopted into E.coli.

The production is organised by the danish production company Alpha film. The documentary are going to be used in high school education. We see it a great benefit to also cover an additional media in the education. The movie is a different way of learning and can hopefully inspire students to ….

Other participants in the documentary is a wide range of professors and scientist from DTU. It is currently in the editing phase, but expected to be published in december 2014.

ESOF 2014


As something very exceptional Copenhagen was the host of Euroscience Open Forum 2014. which is a huge initiative to raise awareness of science in the public. An important element of ESOF 2014 is public outreach programme - Science in the City which takes place in 21-26 June 2014 in Carlsberg City District. We went there with a stand to talk with high school students about iGEM and synthetic biology. We chose to use the electric circuits metaphor to illustrate the great potential within synthetic biology. The ESOF event was mainly attracting students with an interest within science and thereby a great place to reach our target group. Many students didn’t have any knowledge of synthetic biology but left the stand with excited interest.



Technical University of Denmark
Department of Systems Biology
Søltofts Plads 221
2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
+45 45 25 25 25
dtuigem14@gmail.com .

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