The TU-DAY is the open day of our university, the Technische Universität (TU) Braunschweig. The event is aimed at a wide audience and not restricted to people engaged in science. Therefore, the institutions and working groups of the university used the opportunity to introduce themselves and present their research to the public – and so did we!
The members of our team spent all day at our stand to inform interested visitors about our project and synthetic biology in general. In doing so, we were able to clear up some prejudices towards hotly debated topics like genetically modified organisms - without trivializing the risks that might come along with their use. Furthermore, we put our cooperation with the iGEM team of the University of Virginia into practice by conducting their survey on the acceptance of synthetic biology which we had translated to German for this purpose.
A highlight of our stand was our experiment station for kids. Children were taken by the hand here and performed a series of three experiments relating to milk under our instruction. We made various components of milk visible and explained them to our young visitors. During another popular experiment we coloured the milk with food dye and produced amazing colourful patterns by applying a drop of tenside. The amazed looks on the children’s faces made the event even more enjoyable.