Human Practices | Heidelberg - iGEM 2022

Science Communication tips from an Apocalypse expert

“Science communication” - two words that sound quite straightforward. “Just talk about science!” is the simplified appell these two words seem to give, but it is a lot more complicated than that. Since it was the first time planning events that fall under the category of science communication for our team, we wanted to ensure a successful start in this new field. To achieve this, we reached out to experts, hoping to learn from their expertise. We found said expert at a Pint of Science event in Heidelberg.

The Pint of Science festival is an event taking place in bars, pubs, cafés and other public spaces in 25 countries worldwide. It aims to bring the latest scientific research closer to the general public with no prior knowledge being required. The talks are held by the researchers themselves and give opportunity for discussion.

On the 9th of May 2022 the event with the title (Don't) Look Up took place in Heidelberg. One of the speakers was Philipp Schrögel, a research coordinator from the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), who held a presentation about science communication. He talked about climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, more precisely he used those crises as examples of how difficult science communication can be. Presenting and explaining complex scientific facts to the public and giving them instructions is too short-sighted and often not successful (enough).

Foto Pint of Science.
Figure 1: Members of iGEM Team Heidelberg 2022 with Philipp Schrögel at the Pint of Science event. From left to right, in the front row: Linda Kaupp, Heinrike Gilles, Laura Ebert and Franziska Lam; in the back row: Philipp Schrögel, the speaker from the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), and Johann Sora Blakytny.

His speech gave us food for thought, but we additionally interviewed him to get some specific tips for our science communication activities. During our interview we proposed our idea to do a school workshop, since children are the future generation of scientists. He weighed in, that most activities in schools only target students that are already advanced and ignore or even filter out students that do not want to go into academia effectively splitting society in two. We incorporated this problem in our school workshop at the Gemeinschaftsschule in Dielheim. Philipp Schrögel also brought to our attention that it is fundamentally important to target the public, more precisely people who chose not to go into academia. We are facing crises that require the public to have a little scientific understanding with increasing frequency, e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change. Based on this, together with Philipp Schrögel we developed the idea to do an information booth in the pedestrian zone in Heidelberg to have an unfiltered target group due to it being in a public space. A point of criticism of Philipp Schrögel was that most science communication activities are only short term. They do not last long enough to build a relationship between the target group and the scientists involved. This problem was hard for our iGEM Team to tackle since our project is limited to one year. However, we can advise the next year's human practices team to draw on our resources and sustain the relationships we built with people and institutions we had the privilege to work with this year.

Our talk with Philipp Schrögel was immensely helpful to conduct meaningful events for the educational part of our project. From him we learned how complex science communication is and that sensitivity is required to transfer knowledge successfully. We mainly incorporated Philipp Schrögel’s tips in our school workshop in Dielheim and in the information booth, but the awareness he raised was incorporated into every brainstorming session and discussion of our human practices meetings.