Team:DTU-Denmark/Achievements/Policy and Practices

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Policy and Practices Initiatives

It's all about communication! A project only becomes valuable if you are able to communicate your methods and discoveries and pass on your experience to your surroundings. Thus, communication is an essential part of every great project.

Introduction - What Did We Do?

As we have explained in our outreach strategy, we have chosen to focus on inspiring talented high school students from the very beginning of our project. Our intention has not been to teach the students what to think and mean, but on exciting their curiosity and inspire them to seek information on synthetic biology themselves. Our mantra has been:

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity he will continue the learning process as long as he lives
- Clay P. Bedford

There are many ways and platforms to reach Danish high school students, and we have constantly competed about their interest with the social media - we chose the following initiatives to reach the students:

We participated in a inspirational documentary on biomimetics targeted to high school students - especially the students already having an interest within biotechnology and ground-breaking research.
We took advantage of the great opportunity of Denmark hosting Euroscience Open Forum 2014. This event is attracting elite students with interest outside the ordinary high school program, and much of the focus is on inspiring these students to learn more about science. We went to ESOF 2014 to spread the word about synthetic biology and it's many exciting opportunities.
As our main product we developed an interactive workshop, targeted towards talented high school students. These youngsters are the scientists of tomorrow and it has been a great experience to work with them.
We spread the word on synthetic biology and iGEM at a student conference at DTU, Life Science and Beyond, held to make bachelor and master students aware of different ways to expand and specialise ones studies to exceed the ordinary study programme.

Due to our initiatives we have already been contacted by several high school students that have participated in our events, because the field of synthetic biology caught their interest. They are now looking for more information on the subject and for supervision on the major Danish high school assignments. Such requests is a great achievement, and we are proud to have excited the students' interest, and we are eager to help them.

Conclusively, working with talented students have been a great and inspirational experience for all of us. The students' unbiased minds and unspoiled creativity allowed them to come up with ideas that we as university students within the field of synthetic biology have never thought of. As our project developed we also experienced an increasing interest within synthetic biology and it has been a pleasure to pass this along to other students.

Interactive Workshop

In line with our outreach strategy we developed a workshop concept to inspire and take advantage of the creativity of the many talented high school students in Denmark. We held the workshop several times, both in cooperation with Academy for Talented Youth (ATY) and ScienceTalents in Denmark. Both ATY and ScienceTalents are initiatives for ambitious and talented Danish high school students, primarily interested in science, willing to extend their education beyond the ordinary high school curriculum.
The main focus of the workshop was to inspire the students rather than providing them with dry facts and heavy theory. 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.
Furthermore we wanted to take advantage of the creativity of the students. Many Danish high school students are not aware of the power neither the limitations of synthetic biology and the students we engaged with were therefore not primed beforehand nor biased in their way of thinking. Thus, by only providing the most necessary and basic information it was our intention to inspire these youngsters to come up with new and original ideas that are appropriate for different problems - global as well as local.

We initiated the workshops with an introduction to the iGEM competition, synthetic biology and examples on innovative synthetic biology projects partly inspired by previous iGEM projects partly by projects from the synthetic biology society. 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 provided the students. Together with this, they also received a list of elements often applied in synthetic biology such as different proteins, organisms and reporters together with a definition of the individual elements (the toolbox). The students were encouraged to pair elements from the toolbox to develop concepts that could act as (part of) a solution to one or more of the presented problems. During the exercise the students were also encouraged to add problems or elements to the lists and to use their knowledge within other scientific fields and imagination in order to pair up seemingly unrelated elements.

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 concept and material will be passed on to future DTU iGEM teams to enable them to make it a part of their initial idea development phase, as we experienced that especially this part of an iGEM project can be challenging. We emphasised this point to the workshop participants, and it thereby worked as a motivation factor.
During the workshops we naturally ended up discussing the release of GMOs into the environment, as many of the solutions proposed by the students were of a nature that would require the release of GMOs. This initiated a talk about safety in the laboratory and the national as well as regional restrictions associated with GMOs. Please take a look at our pages about safety and ethics if you are interested in our approach on these subjects.

Inspirational Documentary

In order to inspire younger students and pass on our own knowledge and experience on synthetic and biology, we participated in an educational documentary dealing with biomimetics. The documentary dealt with how fascinating nature is and how many great abilities that can be adopted into new applications. Our focus in the documentary was on how nature builds things with identical building blocks - no matter what is build - and how we can apply this concept 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, where bioluminescence from fireflies have been adopted into E. coli .

The production is organised by the Danish production company Alpha film. The documentary is going to be used in the Danish high school educations throughout many years and has been a great financial investment. Thus, our presentation of synthetic biology will be available to high school students for several years to come. We are very excited about benefitting from a communication media in this way, since a scientific documentary is a different way of teaching students. Other participants in the documentary is a wide range of professors and scientist from DTU.

The documentary is currently in the editing phase, but Alpha film expect it to be published during December 2014.

ESOF 2014

In the summer of 2014 Copenhagen, as something very exceptional, hosted the Euroscience Open Forum 2014 (ESOF), which is a huge initiative to raise awareness of science in the public.

An important element of ESOF 2014 was the public outreach programme Science in the City, which took place from June 21 until June 26 2014 in Carlsberg City District, Copenhagen. We participated in Science in the City 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 mainly attracted students with an interest within science, and it was therefore a great forum to reach our target group. Many students did not have any knowledge of synthetic biology, but left with excited interest.

Life Science and Beyond Conference

Even though it extends beyond our target group we participated in a student conference at DTU planned to make both bachelor and master students aware of different ways to expand and specialise ones studies to exceed the ordinary study programme.

We created a poster about iGEM and synthetic biology, and during the conference we told about the many skills and experiences iGEM brings. [LINK (poster .pdf)] Many of the attending students showed great interest in the competition and the interdisciplinary aspects of participating in iGEM, and several students expressed their interest in being a part of the DTU iGEM 2015 team.