HUMAN PRACTICES
Education
Our project "cultured meat" is at the junction of reproductive health rights, microbiome, and synthetic biology. In the process of holding popular science education activities, we accept the feedback of the audience and reflect on the values and the ultimate goals of the project, and put our publicity focus on food safety and standardized production, then strive to create a positive change for the society.
Social media is a powerful tool for driving social change in real-time, our team actively engages with our audience through social media means. We used the WeChat public account platform to create a community about synthetic biology, cultured meat and the food industry. The main content we share here is synthetic biology, cell culture, culture process of cultured meat, etc, we have systematically and scientifically sorted out how cultured meat is produced, and answered some questions learned from public feedback and literature research.
At present, the official account has published a total of 15 articles, including 10 popular science articles, 1 activity report, 2 questionnaire surveys and publicity, and 1 invitation letter, and the total number of page views has reached 5474 times. Because the followers of the public account are mostly young people represented by college students, most of them are avant-garde and active, easy to accept new things, and often put forward some novel ideas. The questions they asked opened up our minds, made the team members pay more attention to the problems that had been overlooked, and gave us a more comprehensive understanding of the technical issues, safety issues, and ethical issues that need to be considered for the study of artificial meat.
This year we set the main target of science popularization as peers of similar age, and most of them are college students with diverse backgrounds. So we have held three scientific education activities in total.
We are also devoted to increase inclusivity and bridge the gap between areas in education. We came to the Midwest area of China, which is not as well-developed as east China. We customized more understandable science materials for young children. While answering their questions, we have a better understanding of and children's understanding of biology, which opens up ideas for cultivating future synthetic biology talents.
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To strengthen our community, we launched a joint science campaign with 11 other universities.
This is a two-day, nationwide science publicity, which is divided into five themes, including Synthetic Biology and Life, Treating Hair Loss, Gene Editing and Production, Medical, Energy use and environmental protection. Through this activity, we tried to build an opportunity for teams to communicate with each other and seek cooperation.
In the discussion part, the lecturers and the audience in the broadcast room interacted actively. Our audience are mainly undergraduate and high school students, and there are also audiences from all walks of life participating in our activities. Undergraduate and high school students have a certain biological foundation, and they are passionate about learning new things. They asked many valuable questions that inspire us to think deeply about the interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology. Simultaneously, we answered some questions from the audience in a life-like tone, and also inspired their interest in biology, making them understand that biology is not only about "lofty" scientific research, but also a ubiquitous and indispensable part of our lives. We have also introduced the iGEM competition so that more students can pay attention to this competition.
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Moreover, we also promote the knowledge of synthetic biology to more people through the new media platform of various universities and the Bilibili platform of the Chemical Association of Beijing University of Chemical Technology, making it easier for people to accept and understand, and further expanding the audience range. Through these activities, we gradually knew that medical treatment, food safety and environmental protection are the main concern of the public. The public's concern for food safety prompted us to think about the market regulation, industry norms, laws and regulations related to cultured meat, which gave us a deeper understanding of the project and became an important theme for our subsequent scientific popularization and research.
The previous research, especially on inclusivity, allowed us to aware importance of children's science popularization. In order to cultivate children's interest in synthetic biology, and to convey the joy we have gained during the project, we have launched our poster with BUCT and the school's popular science practice group “Biology Science Popularization Tiger Team”, which is combined our teams' project and some basic biology knowledge. The production of the poster not only strengthens the interaction between the BUCT-China team and the public, but also makes us understand how to make the complicated biological knowledge attractive, providing experience for this kind of activity to our team members.
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BUCT-China cloud platform is dedicated to building an information sharing platform to promote public understanding of igem activities, cultured meat and the projects of the other teams. We try to provide more detailed scientific information, slides, videos, and codes through the cloud platform, and also offer opportunities for other teams to communicate with each other.
In order to unite more iGEM teams to participate in education and communication, we cooperated with more than fifteen teams to hold many popularization of science, and the specific activities were linked to collaboration.Find out more here!