Human Practices | Fudan

Human Practices Overview

Throughout the previous four years of the Fudan iGEM journey, the Fudan team’s topics for each year were geared toward local issues involving different groups of people. From prevention and treatment of lactose intolerance in infants in 2019, and calcium supplementation for elderly people prone to osteoporosis in 2020, to self-test kits for women’s hygiene in remote areas in 2021, and skin care for workers and students in Shanghai in 2022, we are like solving a jigsaw puzzle, putting together different groups of people of different ages, genders and characteristics in the world year by year. Together, they form an increasingly vast “Fudan iGEM map”.

The Biomanufacturing track is a track we have not been involved before. Having stepped out of our comfort zone, we faced both the excitement of choosing a new track, and the tension that comes with it. Unfortunately, due to the 4-month-long COVID pandemic that ravaged Shanghai, the validation advancement of our wet experiments was slow and many of the expansions we wanted to complete did not have enough time to set about. However, our HP work clearly mapped out the lines, and we were able to anatomize our preject to get an all-around, correct and objective understanding of the project’s current situations and development prospects for the industry, the people, the world, and our home, the Earth. The "Fudan iGEM map" plays a substantial role in decision making from the beginning of our project to the end.

This year, our HP work consists of 3 parts.

The first part focused on the industry chain of skincare ingredient production. We interviewed stakeholders from the upstream (synthetic biologists, dermatologists), midstream (synthetic biology companies on the road to industrialization), and downstream (skincare KOLs, general consumers, and investors), gained their opinions, ideas, thoughts on social issues, and expectations for us. With the insight they gave us, our project proceeds from initially just a word “Vitamin A”, a skincare active ingredient, to a relatively complete, self-consistent theoretical design of a cell factory that was close to consumer demand, industrial feasibility, and good economic benefit.
The second part is located in the laboratory. Our theoretical design could not always go smoothly. We encountered a variety of questions during the step-by-step tests and the answers to these questions were temporarily beyond our knowledge. So, we actively sought help from experts and previous year’s iGEMers. And with the expertise they give us, we optimized the logic of the cell factory operation and obtained more satisfactory results.
In the third part, we deeply anatomized the question “how to deliver a meaningful answer to how to popularize skincare knowledge”. China has a large population with diverse and complex backgrounds, so how to get more people to participate in science popularization activities and get a better educational effect was a problem we found tricky at first. With the help of different science educators, we were able to clarify the route we should take in terms of education and what kind of outreach we expect to achieve. We also used many of the tips they suggested to showcase a lot of beautiful and attractive works. We hope that future iGEM teams, and the rest of the world, will take something away from our outreach exploration.

Each of our interviews is basically done following our path of thinking. This thinking process helped us to clear unnecessary branches and identify what we needed, who we needed to ask for advice from, and what we wanted to achieve in order to ultimately repair the subject.

image for 2022 Fudan iGEM

Part 1: Industry-chain-centered Human Practices: Locating Our Project in the Industry

Overview

Since we set our project goals as a synthetic biology solution for skincare Vitamin A production, firstly we have to figure out what stakeholders along the skincare industry chain are involved if we successfully industrialize our progect. Once we start our journey of exploration, we take these following questions into consideration along the way.

Upstream: What are the synthetic biology principles underlying our project? What about the theoretical feasibility of our model? What about the skincare expertise from dermatologists?
Midstream: What’s the barrior that we need to overcome to enhance its industrial feasibility ?
Downstream: What do skincare KOLs, skincare customers and industry investors think really matters of skincare products and their prospects?

Here is the overall picture of our industry chain journey.

image for 2022 Fudan iGEM

Upstream: Theoretical Level from Synthetic Biology & Dermatology

Prof. Yong Wang: Synthetic Biology Could Make A Difference

Prof. Yong Wang is the Deputy Director of Key Laboratory of Synthetic Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His main research interest is to develop natural or unnatural active ingredients by analyzing the biosynthetic pathways of natural products, applying the ideas and methods of synthetic biology, and improving the biosynthetic efficiency of complex natural products and their production methods based on engineering design and constructs.

Focusing on the core needs for (i) more functional and well-characterized components for design; (ii) tools and methods that enable the design, adaptation and optimization of heterologous modules; and (iii) chassises to be tolerant to heterologous synthesized products and able to transport them to the extracellular compartment, Prof. Yong Wang has spent the past five years working on natural product component discovering and design, module assembly integration and adaptation, product tolerance and transport, etc.

Through these five years of work, he has:

analyzed the synthetic pathways of some active components of medicinal plants (e.g., the synthetic pathways of tetracyclic diterpenoids and their glycosylation modifications of shellacene, and the biosynthetic pathways of flavonoids such as baicalein);
obtained a number of structurally novel compounds based on synthetic biotechnology; obtained a series of biosynthetic, regulatory, and transport-related components and engineering chassises for the design of synthetic biology of natural products.
developed tools and methods for component design, module adaptation, and system optimization, such as wet and dry lab combination methods based on system-synthetic biology.

Vitamin A is a natural product majorly from animals, but it could also be transformed from pro-Vitamin A, such as β-carotene, which is majorly from plants. This is a perfect match for us who initially aim for building cell factories to produce natural skincare molecules with primary dry lab simulations.

The view of Wang Lab

What We Want To Know

Cell factories have been theoretically and practically summarized in many typical synthetic routes. The same class of typical substances and their derivatives can be synthesized through the same or similar routes from the same or similar substrates.
So in which class of typical products can Vitamin A (retinol, retinal, etc.) essentially be classified? Is there a more established synthetic biology production route for this class of products in academia and industry?
If there is no established route, then, we take a step back, one of the key intermediates in our project is β-carotene. β-carotene can be classified as a typical product in which category? Is there a more established synthetic route for β-carotene?
What is the difference of the synthetic route we have designed compared to the more mature and established synthetic routes? Is our route theoretically feasible?
Our main reaction route is basically described as “the product of the previous step is the substrate of the next step”, which is a characteristic of the “chain reaction pathway”. What kind of problems is likely to occur in the actual experimental verification of the reaction route of the linear reaction pathway?
What are the possible reasons for these problems? Are there any classical and mature strategies or methods to solve these problems in the academic and industrial fields?
The production of lipophilic substances in cellular hydrophilic systems may bring about problems of low yields and difficulty in extracting products from cells. How to produce substances with different polarity in a cellular hydrophilic system? What other mechanisms need to be introduced?

Our Takeaways

The precursor of Vitamin A, β-carotene, belongs to the terpenoids and has been synthesized through a classical route, that is, by producing lycopene to obtain β-carotene. The subsequent changes of β-carotene are of two kinds: one is the equal splitting into two retinal molecules by an oxidase BCMO, and the retinal is oxidized or reduced to produce retinoic acid or retinol; the other one is unequal splitting, in which β-carotene is transformed into β-apocarotenal first, and finally into retinoic acid by oxidation. It is generally believed that the conversion of β-carotene to Vitamin A relies mainly on the former route. This oxidase is an enzyme dissolved in the cytosol and was first identified in the liver and intestine of rats. Subsequent studies have shown that the gene is also present in the liver, lung, kidney and skin tissues of some animals. Many animals, such as zebrafish, rats, fruit flies and humans, contain significant amounts of this oxidase.
Multiple issue may arise under the multi-enzyme chain reaction. The issue of flux imbalance occurs due to a mismatch of enzyme substrate availability and enzyme efficiency. This can become an issue of overabundance or lack of intermediates. The second issue is with the potential loss of intermediates as these intermediates cross membranes or migrate towards cell regions lacking pathway enzymes. Because of the inability of these intermediates to act as substrates for future steps, total yield decreases. The third issue is pathway competition, where pathway intermediates are exhausted by native cellular processes, thereby reducing yield. The fourth is toxic intermediates, where toxic intermediates interfere with native processes of the cell through prevention of critical chemical production, leading to cell harm or death. Altogether, these issues significantly disturb the process of metabolic engineering, which limits the feasibility of producing what we want.
Cellular compartmentalization and phase separation can be introduced to create regions of different polarity within the cell, allowing regional enrichment of lipid-soluble substances.

Interview with Prof. Yong Wang

Dr. Chengfeng Zhang: Patients’ Attitude through the Dertamologist’s Eyes

Dr. Chengfeng Zhang is a dermatologist of the Department of Dermatology at Fudan Huashan Hospital. He treats pigment disorders (e.g. vitiligo, various pigmented spots), skincare related diseases (e.g. acne, facial dermatitis), allergic skin diseases (e.g. eczema, urticaria) and various intractable skin diseases.

In addition, he often participates in scientific activities and dermatologic conferences. He has received the third prize in the Shanghai Science Education Innovation Award for Contribution to Science (2020), the 24th World Congress of Pigment Research Rising Star (Only one in Asia, 2020), the 10th ASPCR Conference Travel Scholarship (2019), The 6th International Conference on Experimental Dermatology (IID) Travel Award (2013), etc.

His professional experiences and honors convince us that he is the right person that we should consult about Vitamin A side effects, skincare principles, and patients’ cognitions .

Dr. Chengfeng Zhang

What We Want To Know

What kind of molecules can provide the best anti-aging skincare ability? What about its side effects and ways of prevention?
What are the common characteristics and misconceptions of patients with skin issues for their wrong choice of skin care products, wrong perception of molecules, etc.?

Our Takeaways

Different skincare effective ingredients have different functional focuses and correspondingly different skincare effects. The most recent molecules include Vitamin A, ceramides, tripeptides, etc. The older generation of molecules, such as Vitamin C, are relatively less of attention. Vitamin A is pretty versatile, with powerful anti-oxidation and anti-aging effects, but it would cause skin irritation without basic understanding.
A significant percentage of people with skin issues have a great need for skin care, but a small percentage of them are guided to appropriate skin care.

Patients with skin diseases have a more sensitive and fragile skin barrier compared to the general population, and different types of skin diseases have different reactivity to different skincare ingredients, while the current market-oriented skincare products cannot be personalized for skincare solutions.
Patients with skin diseases have a lower tolerance for skincare risks than the general population because their skin condition is poor and they are not willing to accept that their skin condition will be worse after using skincare products, even if it is temporary.
Dermatologists are willing to pay a higher price than the average person for maintaining their skin condition, and they are willing to spend more money and time on skincare products as long as they are really effective, i.e. they have a higher tolerance for the convenience and price of using skincare products.

During our interview, Dr. Chengfeng Zhang has to take care of patients coming for advice and prescriptions

Midstream: Industrialization Considerations

Mr. Linkun Qiao from Bluepha: Industrial Viewpoint of Project Feasibility

Mr. Linkun Qiao graduated from Fudan University and now works for Bluepha MIS (Market & Intelligence Scout) team in Shanghai.

Bluepha is a leading synthetic biology industrialization company in China, with PHA production and other product lines under incubation, attracting billions of RMB investment. Fudan University and Bluepha have a good history of cooperation. At the very beginning of our project, we positively contact Bluepha and asked the relevant Research & Development team for their insights on the feasibility of our project in terms of industrialization.

First communication meeting with Bluepha in the beginning of our project design

What We Want To Know

What are the advantages and disadvantages of our choice of the cosmetics and beauty track at the level of industrial development?
What are the industrial innovations and the latest technologies for the production process and preservation process of skincare products?
How should the chassis organism be selected?

Our Takeaways

The medical cosmetics & skin care track is topical, with high added value and economic benefits of the product. Our selection is the closest to the real industry among universities in Shanghai that Bluepha has already been contacted by this year.
Possible innovations may include: (i) formula compounding. It can achieve the effect of “1+1 is greater than 2”. For example, Vitamin A plus Vitamin C or tocopherol, etc., to form a composite formula. These substances are all of anti-oxidation and anti-aging ability, and combining two or even more of them may get a formula with better effect; (ii) encapsulation technology. This technology rely on chemical and physical processes. We need to consider whether there is a synthetic biology solution to wrap our Vitamin A with lipid; (iii) protection mechanism. Since Vitamin A is not stable, adding more protection is helpful to make it marketed, but there is large industry barrier of protection technologies.
We need to focus on the cost when selecting the chassis. Choosing whether eukaryotic or prokaryotic cells is not a problem. However, we need to bring the cost down. Large companies have highlighted the problem: what they want is a synthetic biology solution with environmental protection and lower production costs.

The second meeting with Bluepha on our primitive design plan

Downstream: Skincare KOL, Customer & Investor Investigation

Mengdesijiu, a Fudan Cosmetics & Skincare Influencer: Professional And Intriguing Insights

Miss Lin (as known as her screen name Mengdesijiu as her screen name) is a Fudan graduate student and a beauty vlogger with over 200,000 followers on the video platform Bilibili. The content of her videos focuses on makeup techniques, and promoting the value of anti-appearance anxiety. She is currently interning at a beauty company.

What we are curious about is: as an intern at a beauty company and professional beauty & skincare vlogger, what are her unique views on skincare product selection compared to general consumers? After becoming a vlogger, what kind of psychological characteristics did she observe from ther video audience? As a female blogger, what are her views on stereotypes in the skincare field?

The interview with Mengdesijiu

What We Want To Know

What factors does she prioritize when choosing skincare products?
We have noticed that some vloggers analyze and promote skincare products based on their ingredients, how does she feel about this ingredient-oriented promotion?
Her opinion on the age and gender of beauty and skincare.
What are her thoughts or solutions to address the existing bias of males doing makeup and skincare?
From a cosmetic company’s point of view, how does she identify potential markets and promote their products?
What are the requirements for medical cosmetic skincare products to reach the mainstream market?

Our Takeaways

Her priority of choosing skincare products is user reviews. She will first pay attention to user reviews on social media platforms and shopping apps to make a choice based on her personal skincare needs.
The most important thing about ingredient-oriented promotion is the science principle, which is very demanding for vloggers. Many skincare ingredients have different skincare effects on different skin types. For example, the effect of a recent hit “copper tripeptide” is very uncertain, so consumers should be cautious.
The ingredient-oriented promotion must be prudent. The promoter should be cautious in presenting the information from the scientific point of view, and the audience should be cautious in receiving the information from the aspect of personal skin type and personal skincare needs. Altogether, prudence is needed.
Doing beauty is a pretty common and increasingly everyday thing, like a small snack outside of three meals a day, not a necessity but something that makes us more pleasant. Putting on a decent amount of makeup is a way to please ourselves.
The most important thing about skin care is being comfortable. Skin care is a way to make skin more comfortable, and through skin care, the skin looks better and healthier.
About age: It is necessary to guide young children. Children are at an important stage in their development and knowledge, we should guide them to have a healthy understanding of “beauty” and to focus on what they should be focusing on right now. As for the elderly, they have the right to pursue beauty at any age. This is also something she wants to continue to focus on. She wants to persist in being a beauty vlogger, as she grows older, social experience and skin condition changes, she will continue to “evolve” to become a beauty vlogger in her age group.
About gender: She has 20% of male fans, and she has also given makeup to a cross-dresser in her videos before. The male fans often leave comments in the comment section, saying that there is no suitable channel to get relevant knowledge. It’s not that men are not interested in makeup and skincare, they have a need for beauty, but they are troubled and don’t know where to learn about it. First of all, the market is calling and waiting for the rise of male beauty vloggers, which requires the business with interest to promote. The business for the development of the male skincare market has its own internal drive, and the market and business will form benign mutual cooperation, thus opening up new business areas. Skincare products only differ in skin type, not in gender. Therefore, a new market is needed to guide the public and to guide the boys.
About identifying potential market and product promotion of companies: The main thing is to conclude feedback from the consumers’ point of view through research; at the same time, make comparisons among similar products to find out the highlights that can be explored and the shortcomings that can be made up.
Their promotion department is divided into two major groups: the product group and the marketing group. The product group is responsible for exploring the highlights of the product, while the marketing group is responsible for comparing the advantages and disadvantages of the product with other products of the same type.
After this, the company will focus on the three aspects of product for promotion: ingredients, convenience of use and comparison with competing products. For some products similar to the big brands, the company will focus on them to achieve the purpose of promotion close to the existing market of big brands.
Cosmetic medical products are of excellent quality and safety. What entreprises need to do is expand investment and increase the promotion of new media platforms, such as collaboration with KOLs and KOCs. Compared with KOLs, KOCs’ feedback is more real and easier to go into the public. At the same time, doctors providing professional introduction is another great means.

The HP team with Mengdesijiu

Customer Research: Group Cognition

The previous Fudan cosmetics KOL reminds us to have thorough research on customers, which is of great importance when we are getting in touch with a larger and broader group of concerning people.

What We Want To Know

What is the overall consideration of common skincare customers and their group behavior when choosing their skincare products?

Our Takeaways Based on 400+ Questionnaire Results

Significant relationship between stress and emergency skincare behaviour. Greater stress indicates bigger chances to do emergency skincare behaviors.
Sex differences in skincare use. No statistical sex difference in self-rated skincare product knowledge, but interviews revealed a wide gap.
People pay dominant attention to the actual effects of certain skincare ingredients.
Retinol, one of the most commonly used Vitamin A forms, is not well-known compared with other ingredients like amino acid or hyaluronic acid.

Miss Xinru Li, A Cosmetics Product Manager: Entrepreneurial Mindset

Miss Xinru Li is a Product Manager working at Bluepha Beijing. As a professional woman working in the synthetic biology track, she has considerable industrial experience in the application of synthetic biology in skincare and medical cosmetics, and is happy to share it with us.

Miss Xinru Li

What We Want To Know

Entrepreneurial insights of “She Economy” and “He Economy”.
Capital focus on potential molecules, formulas and brands.
Noteworthy skincare company operation models.

Our Takeaways

The prosperity of She Economy and He Economy could be attributed to the domestic rise of consumption capacity since China has been growing continuously. But we should not neglect that the skincare needs of "he"s have been discovered and strengthened currently.
Throughout the global market of skincare active ingredients, the most frequently applied ingredients are plant extracts, biotechnology actives (small molecules or microorganism extracts) and synthetic actives (vitamins) in order. In recent years, the penetration of peptide also continue to improve. Research data show that the above four main types of active ingredients accounted for more than 80% of the global active ingredients market.
Winova of Botanee and brands of Bloomage Biotech are both promising local brands with comprehensive research and development plans. Even though they start their enterprises from different aspects, they both enjoy the popularity of domestic and even overseas customers.

To Integrate

We have gone through a survey tour of the industry chain and have summarized the following key points:

Choosing the theoretically & industrially feasible and relatively unnoticed ingredient, Vitamin A, would be of great economic benefit. But first, we should rise public awareness of Vitamin A by means of KOL/KOC recommendations, highlighting technology or efficacy superiority over other competitors, etc.
Sensitive skin is a great issue which concerning people are widely aware of. Retinol of Vitamin A is versatile but is not stable and may irritate the skin, so we could find other forms of Vitamin A with less hazard and better stability in future experiments.
The synthetic biology solution we proposed is promising, but we should pay attention to the cost when we want to industrialize it.
Our takeaways from human practice work about industry-chain show great impact on our project formation process as well as the industry which our target points to and the world we live in positively.

Part 2: In the Lab: Improving Our Design

Overview

It is not easy to put our envisioned project into real practice and make it work. Thanks to the instructions from the professors and fellows below, we could introduce part elements to enhance our primitive design, and integrate our endeavors into a comprehensive Vitamin A cell factory model.

2017 Fudan iGEMer Yan Liu : Hammerhead Ribozyme

As many pieces of research show, the major problem of polycistronic vectors which contain two or more target genes under one promoter is the much lower expression of the downstream genes compared with that of the first gene next to the promoter. In this case, we should find a method to improve the efficiency of the translation of genes downstream since we initially make all β-carotene producing enzyme genes (crtE, B, I, Y) tandem along the plasmid sequence but we do not want to encounter flux imbalances mentioned by Prof. Yong Wang.

We consulted 2017 Fudan iGEMer Yan Liu for this problem, who developed a Ribozyme-Assisted Polycistronic co-expression system (pRAP) for heterologous co-production and in vivo assembly of multi-subunit complexes and has started the patent application. She generously advised us to separate crtE, B, I, and Y by inserting hammerhead ribozyme between them, instead of arranging one promotor for each coding sequence. After the transcription of the polycistronic vector is completed, the RNA sequence of the hammerhead ribozyme will conduct self-cleaving and separate the long piece of mRNA into segments corresponding to each coding sequence.

In this way, mutual interference of translation processes like forming secondary or tertiary structures of mRNA can be avoided, thus permitting faithful protein complex assembly. The feasibility of changing the production and proportion of target proteins by adjusting the strength of RBS is thus greatly enhanced. A more elaborate description of this method is provided on the description page.

Once we applied Hammerhead Ribozyme in our design, we got promising results, proving the cleaving efficiency of hammerhead ribozymes.

When we set equal RBS in a polycistronic co-expression system, we didn’t see any production of β-carotene (no color change). However, when we use stronger RBS in front of crtE and crtB while using weaker RBS in front of crtY, we can see an obvious color change in EP tubes. This can prove that we can change the production of target proteins by simply adjusting RBS strength with the help of ribozymes.

We are consulting senior iGEMer Yan Liu about how to apply ribozyme in our design.

Prof. Motoyuki Hattori: BCMO Detection Method

β-Carotene 15,15’-MonoOxygenase (BCMO) is one of the essential enzymes in our single-cell factory. To affirm the expression of BCMO after adding IPTG, we ran the SDS-PAGE. Unexpectedly, we didn’t get a significant change in the protein gel electrophoresis results after we added IPTG. As the following figure indicates, it seemed that our bacteria didn’t successfully express our target protein.

Lane 3~6 depicts a low expression level of BCMO induced by IPTG.

We wondered what caused this problem and how to improve the situation, so we went to interview Prof. Motoyuki Hattori, who did great research on transmembrane proteins and ion channels. He advised us to change the assay we chose to detect the expression level of protein BCMO in the first step. We need to figure out whether or not the transmembrane protein BCMO is successfully expressed. If not, how could we improve the expression level?

He informed us that SDS-PAGE with CBB staining is not suitable for membrane protein expression detection and FSEC is a general method for it. However, our instructor Prof. Liang Cai reminded us that we undergraduates may not be able to perform this assay well. In this case, Prof. Motoyuki Hattori advised us to add some tags and antibodies to this transmembrane protein to do Western blotting. So we tagged a fluorescent protein StayGold to our target protein and detected its expression through fluorescence imaging. As the following figure indicates, we got the positive result that a considerable amount of BCMO was expressed in bacteria.

Fluorescent imaging confirms the expression of both BCMO and ybbO.
We are consulting Prof. Motoyuki Hattori.

Prof. Guoliang Lu: Advice throughout Design And Experiment

We also consulted Prof. Guoliang Lu, who gave us advice on the detection of membrane protein expression, strain selection, etc. He did a lot in helping us to make an achievement in the engineering cycle.

Zhongyi Yang with Prof. Guoliang Lu

Part 3: Outreach Exploration: Outreach Exploration

Overview

What should we do to make educational activities reach more people? How can we enhance the penetration and sense of participation in our educational activities to obtain better effects and influences?

These questions deserve deep consideration before carrying out our educational work.

We interviewed the following professors or experts with our questions and curiosity. They are of different ages, come from all walks of life, and have different social and professional backgrounds, however, they all have a lot of professional experience on the path of science education. We are very grateful to them for giving many valuable opinions and ideas. Their encouragement and anticipation inspired us to accomplish fruitful educational activities.

Prof. Ling Yang: Make Your Own Science Popularization Work to Engage the Public

Ms. Ling Yang is an associate professor from the Department of Cellular and Genetic Medicine, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University. She is responsible for teaching undergraduate and graduate students theoretical courses on “Cell Biology” and “Medical Genetics” as well as related laboratory courses.

She also teaches “Transmission of Medical Knowledge”, where Ms. Yang shared her experiences in science education and how to complete a science popularization work on our own. The skills learned in this course were continuously practiced and consolidated in our subsequent education activities.

Prof. Ling Yang

What We Want To Know

What are the main platforms for science popularization activities and works nowadays?
What kind of science education forms do the public like? What are the main points that need attention?
We have seen a large number of science popularization articles on the Internet nowadays, which seem to be scientific but actually mislead the readers and the public. What is the principle beneath their existence?

Our Takeaways

In China and the rest of the world, social media articles, short videos and podcasts bears huge amount of science knowledge for the public. Science education on these platforms will have a relatively great number of views and interactions.
Nowadays, the public generally does not have sufficient tolerance for lengthy articles, videos and audio, so the length of these media works should not be too long, the content should not be too much, and the articles should not be filled with crowded texts. The use of graphics, pictures, or creative form of layout will have a very good eye-catching effect.
“Clickbait” and “pseudo-science” without careful evidence may attract huge views and monetizing effect, buy they are very taboo in science education. The clickbaits earns views through shocking headlines without substantive content. “Pseudo-science” may look scientific, but it is not supported by real papers and will make the audience form wrong perceptions. However, on the other hand, a “catchy” headline is a way to get more exposure as long as it is explained in scientific detail in your work.

The lectures that Prof. Yang Ling gives
The final work that our HP mates created, with attractive layout

Miss Yanyang Sun from “Same As Child” Science Book Creation Project For Kids: How to Make Books Attrative to Children?

Miss Yanyang Sun is a Class of 2021 Chinese Language And Literature student at Fudan University. She is the Chief Operating Officer of the children’s book creation project “Same As Child”.

With the concept of “university has walls, but knowledge has no walls”, the project aims to create world-class children’s books and let the best people lead the next generation to become even better.

Initially, the project was led by Prof. Dawei Zhang of Fudan University, who gathered several students from the School of Journalism, the Department of Chinese Language And Literature, the School of Economics and other departments at Fudan University to form an innovative entrepreneurial project. This project participated in the 7th China International College Students’ ‘Internet+’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition hosted by the Ministry of Education of the PRC and won the national gold medal.

Three years have passed since the project was founded. The project has successfully incubated several educational book series for children, including the popular series “Be Your Own Health Guard” for the protection against the new pandemic. They hope to become a world-renowned professional content creator for children in the future.

The reason why we wanted to interview Sun Yanyang and the team of “Same As Child” is that we are making an exploratory plan for the future of synthetic biology science popularization: if the topic of synthetic biology is successfully selected for book series publication, how should we incubate a new children’s book IP to light up the curiosity and joy of the biological world for children all over the world? What kind of personalized help can we, as university students, seek to take this book series forward?

Logo of Same As Child
The Child Book Series Be Your Own Health Guard

What We Want To Know

What’s the journey of founding Same As Kid?
What difficulties have been encountered in promoting children’s science books to bookstores, the Internet and other platforms?
What kind of official help has been given such as schools or universities?
How did the Be Your Own Health Guard inspire and encourage the creation of other contents for kids later?

Our Takeaways

They actually wanted to make the entrepreneurial project into an entreprise. So in 2019, the team started to make some preparations, recruiting core members, polishing works, generating team concepts, and diving into various forms of works, such as master classes, stationery, cultural creations, and later extended to science picture books (The Great Questions In A Meal, The Mouse In The Zodiac). But because of the epidemic, the focus was shifted to publishing the first series of books: protection against pandemic (Be Your Own Health Guard).
Difficulties: difficulties in publishing (communication between authors and editors); uncertainty in the publishing cycle (have written a manuscript, drawn pictures, but not able to publish it); finding a rental space for work; finding a business partner.
Help received: the start-up fund provided by the school, the YF Capital Fund, the Science and Technology Fund (Science and Technology China Cultural and Creative Grant Program), and the support given by Fudan in the early stage of the business.
Why succeeded: we have the correct mentality: we are really into business and not limited to participating in the competition; we participate in the competition to promote the importance of children’s edition of science books to more people; we timely responded to social trend: science education and scientific research are equally important; there are many scholars in Fudan University that we can consult.
Inspiration: Do not skimp on creativity, be more mature and brave.

The Interview of Miss Yanyang Sun

Miss Wenqian Sun, Executive Curator of MoCA Shanghai: Link Science And Art

As more and more emerging technologies touches our lives, it affects people in every aspects. Artists have also been exploring new possibilities in this wave of technology, imagining a broader future. Related exhibitions such as Mind Temple, curated by MoCA Shanghai, have impressed our HP team members. So, when Fudan 2022 iGEM team was first formed in the fall semester of 2021, we decided to link the vision of science and art in education and expand the boundaries of synthetic biology and art presentation.

We reached out to Wenqian Sun, curator of Mind Temple and executive director of MoCA Shanghai, to express our desire to collaborate with MoCA Shanghai and to ask her for advice on how to enhance education power and audience engagement in promoting art. Sun agreed to collaborate, which allows us to continue our activities with MoCA in 2021 and 2022.

Miss Wenqian Sun

What We Want To Know

How should we balance the content and depth of art and science in order to attract the public with artistic works while getting the science knowledge implanted?

Our Takeaways

An “immersive” exhibition allows the viewer to make full use of their senses to perceive the aura of the work, while a relatively professional tour allows the viewer to further understand the ideas that the work is trying to convey. Only with sufficient contact with the artwork and a certain level of understanding can the viewer obtain ideas and meanings from the artwork.
The fruits of science will be reflected in the way the artwork is presented, while the artists’ reflections on the ethics of science are embedded in the main theme of the work.

Inspired by Curator Sun, we have added more sensory experiences to our art promotion activities and expanded the single exhibition into a set of series of activities with bio-art as the core.

Our activities with MoCA Shanghai and our efforts to promote bioart are detailed in the Education section.

Mr. Boyong Ma: Medical History Is Intertwined with Our Human’s Life, Which Is Never Boring

Boyong Ma, whose real name is Li Ma, is born in 1980. He is a member of the Chinese Writers Association and a famous writer. He is the winner of the People’s Literature Award, Zhu Ziqing Prose Award and Mao Dun Literary Newcomer Award.

Boyong Ma is praised as a “wizard writer” by Chinese and overseas readers. His masterpieces include “The Ming Dynasty under the Microscope”, the full-length novel “The Game of Antiques”, “One Day of Chang’an”, etc. A large number of these works have also been adapted into TV series.

This year, Boyong Ma published his latest historical novel “The Great Physician”. The book tells the story of 112 years ago, in 1910 Shanghai, a northeastern boy who survived death on the battlefield of Japan and Russia, a Guangdong boy who grew up running errands in the London embassy, and a Shanghai girl who refused to live in her peace and prosperity. These three young people, with different origins, personalities and encounters, chose to enter a newly established hospital at the same time and have tumultuous medical careers.

In fact, the focus of this historical novel is on the first generation of public charity physicians in China’s real history, and the book also revolves around the now well-known Fudan Huashan Hospital.

At the beginning of the COVID outbreak in 2020, Boyong Ma, who had just started writing for two months, wanted to give up writing The Great Physician for fear of being misunderstood. But as his writing and research progressed, the current state of the pandemic instead allowed Boyong Ma to find more resonance in history.

After sharing some old stories about previous pandemics with people around him, all of them were deeply struck by the similarity between these stories and the current pandemic - the public knows too little about China’s modern medical stories. The ups and downs of those years are only found in academic monographs and memoirs, and no one asks for them.

In order to write this historical novel, Boyong Ma consulted a lot of historical experts and materials. Although it was a tedious journey for other people to check whether the settings in the book were historically accurate in the vast amount of data and information, he observed that there were so many interesting and ingenious historical facts that happened during the budding period of mordern Chinese medicine, which were silent in old documents waiting to be discovered. Through the history when China was fluttering in the storms nearly a century ago, he brings readers a fascinating and intriguing history of modern China medicine development.

We were inspired by Boyong Ma’s journey to create The Great Physician. We interviewed Ma about how to create compelling science works and how to make our works reflect the vast context of the times and the humanistic concerns behind it.

Mr. Boyong Ma

What We Want To Know

How to make the science popularization works related to medicine more interesting and vivid, so that the public can have abundant curiosity even when facing the possibly obscure knowledge?
When writing the book “The Great Physician”, you have referred to many books about medicine. What do you think are the obstacles to the popularization of the history of medicine in China now, and even the state of development of the popularization of science now?

Our Takeaways

When writing historical fiction, although we hired many scientific advisors, most of them were unable to answer the question when we asked whether the scenario created in the book was historically accurate. For example, many modern war dramas set during the 1940s show armies fighting over penicillin, which does not exist in history. Because during that period, penicillin had not yet reached China even if it was discovered. In fact, the cultivation of medical students nowadays ignores the study of medical development history. Penetrating students with the history of the development of modern medicine helps to form patriotism and humanistic spirits.
Many public figures known to people nowadays also had their names in medical history. By using people’s well-known figures as the entry point, the public can feel dismayed that “Did this really happen in history?”, which can give the audience a deep impression. For example, Beihong Xu was once hospitalized in Chongqing’s Southwest Hospital in the 1930s, so we can see his own signing on the antique medical records. This beyond-perception fact is what people like and are happy to learn.

Before our interview, Mr. Boyong Ma held a lecture talking about his thoughts when writing The Great Physician

To Integrate

Our science popularization work can adopt the following points.

Our science popularization work should remember or adopt the following points.

The text should be concise and scientific, and we can use new media and pictures layout to achieve an attractive work.
Melting science with art could subconsciously accomplish the purpose of education with great performance.
Science popularization can be introduced by examples that are intriguing and real.
Science popularization cannot neglect younger readers, and we should bare with the fact that there is still very little science education content for kids in China and the world.
Science popularization should strive to complete the implementation of humanistic care and patriotic sentiment.
Don’t forget to ask for assistance from the school, the university, and external people.

The science popularization part in our human practice work helps a lot in the promotion of our project, and also plays a significant role in informing the world of skin care knowledge, making people paying more attention on their skin issue. Our science popularization work also provides good reference to the human practice work of iGEMers in the coming years.