Team:DTU-Denmark/Achievements/Policy and Practices

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 nor 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 the students were provided with a list of global problems within different categories such as human health, climate and environment and the future increase in population. With this the students 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.

• 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.