Policy & Practice

Our Questions

Last year iGEM Kyoto decided to continue our popularization activities of synthetic biology as human practice projects. One of the major problems we found in our society was people's luck of knowledge about biotechnology. The luck of knowledge includes, for example, unreasonable fear genetic modifications and insufficient discussions about biosafety. This could be causing more serious problems, such as ignorance of ethics and safety concerning biotechnology.

As our annual popularization activity, we held a poster session open to the public at our school festival in 2013. After the session some of the audience told us, "Before we listened to the explanations, I was totally unfamiliar with synthetic biology and had a negative image on it from its name, but now I find your works and synthetic biology very interesting." Through this session we learned how little synthetic biology was known to the public, and that even short explanations could give them a positive image on it.

Facing these situations, we doubted our activities up to then, and felt that we needed to introduce new ways of popularization. To get started with the new attempt, we set our question as below; how can we interact with people outside of the university who are not in the scientific society?

Our Approach

Then, we started to consider how to approach. At first, we recalled the experience, and we thought our explanation is enough to tell how synthetic biology is interesting. However, we realized there is a little occasion to do a presentation for considerable number of people. Then, we considered how we get an audience and decided to visit high schools. We also sought to introduce them into our field and enlarge our voice in future. Thus, we visited Zeze high school, Shiga Prefecture. And, explained what iGEM is, what synthetic biology is, what we did in 2013 and how we realized the project to a class for students who want to enter scientific departments.

After the teaching, some students took an interest in iGEM high school and visited our lab. This convinced us of the effectiveness of communication. However, in this way, we have to make preparation for every class, and it forces us much effort. While our education program should be spread for all over Japan, it is difficult to spread in this method.

We thought how to improve this weak point, and decided to change our approach. Our new approach is like this; make a booklet for distributing it widely in Japanese high school. We aimed the booklet can promote readers' interests in synthetic biology and reasonable understanding. Therefore, we made plans as following.

To tell how biology is interesting, explanation about how gene is getting worked and affects biological activity and how we manipulate genes is written, avoiding using technical terms as possible. Add to it, iGEM Kyoto 2012' project is explained in the same section.

To tell what synthetic biology is, many cute illustrations are used for making it easy to understand.

To support learning more detailed things, we wrote reviews of our recommendation books.

Before distributing the booklet, we asked Mr. Takada, a science teacher in high school attached to Kyoto University of Education, to comment on our booklet. He commented as "Photos and cute illustrations making the booklet easy to read. This point is very good. I thought writing subtitles and main contents as a form of Question and Answer makes the booklet easier to read for readers who are not interested is science. Furthermore, we also asked Dr. Kano, professor of science communication, to evaluate the booklet. He said ""

As those comments saying, our approach has certain potential to attribute science education. And making the booklet also affected our works. We re-realized what synthetic biology is.

Through the approach, we reached an answer to our question; we can play a leading role to get closer scientific society and public and we should do.

To prevail such approach, we open our booklet to public. We are glad when it helps your projects.

Discussion

As we described, teaching in High schools is effective approach. We will continue the teaching in parallel with attributing the booklet.

We still have not distributed the booklet to high school students. Thus, we will distribute it to high school attached to Kyoto University of Education as a trial. Then, get feedback from students and modify it. After modification, we will contact the Kyoto City Board of Education to ask distribute the booklet to high schools in Kyoto city.