Popularizing science and synthetic biology with the general public is essential to make people aware of the engagement of science to tackle actual and local issues. It is important to give people concepts for a basic understanding of everyday science facts. We decided to focus more on two publics: the main stakeholders, which are the oyster farmers, and children. Moreover, after discussion with oyster farmers, we decided to explain to the general public why oysters can be infected by human pathogens.
With oyster farmers: communication & education are essential
After a long discussion with Yannick Desplats we became aware of the lack of communication between scientists and oyster farmers. In the profession, researchers are seen as “bad cop” and are associated with prohibition to work. In fact, when some pathogens are detected by scientists in the Thau lagoon, they impose to stop sales and production. Oyster farmers do not really understand the reasons why they cannot perform their job. Through a booklet, we tried to explain to them the physiopathology of oysters and why it is important to detect pathogens. Moreover, we added a section to explain how our test works (* Instructions for use were written by making assumptions about how the test will work in the field. The booklet has to be updated once the protocol is optimized and adapted to detect environmental samples.)
With children: initiation to the scientist approach is the key word
We first developed a game dedicated to 8 to 14 years old children. The aim of the game is to understand the way researches are conducted: problem - hypothesis - reflection about the experiments - experiments (drylab and/or wetlab) - results - conclusion and discussion. The format of the game is a board game where they have to go through all the boxes in the right order to follow the road of research. All along the game, children are considered as scientists. Their goal is to understand what synthetic biology is and what is the aim of our project. They have to analyze press articles to find hypotheses about oyster infections. Then to understand the principle of synthetic biology they have to assemble puzzle pieces depending on the size order of biological “things”. The comparison between synthetic biology and a puzzle is the following: in synthetic biology we assemble biobricks to build a biological machine that has a role. Building a puzzle is assembling pieces, with a particular shape, together to form something. In the end the puzzle matches with the shape of a bacteria: the bacteria we want to detect because it is responsible for oyster infections. The next step is to understand in which case bacteria will be detected. At the end of the game, we provide a recap, for them to keep in mind what the research process is. As we wanted to develop a game that is doable everywhere, we did it on a computer. The goal right now, is to code it in HTML to have an online and interactive version of the game. Moreover, we want to give this game to either teachers or parents; for them to be able to understand the objective of this board game, we wrote instructions. Finally, we plan to try the game with children during the actual scholar year. We already have contact with a middle school in Aveyron (12 - France) and one in Heyrault (34 - France).
Our second action with children was to participate in the National Science Festival the 8th and 9th of October. We participated in a workshop painting with bacteria set up by Elsa (PhD in synthetic biology at the “Centre de Biologie Structurale”). The aim of this workshop is to give children a fun perception of science and also the notion that microbes are not all harmful!
With the general public, mission: make the voices of oysters heard
In general, when people get sick after oyster consumption, they usually don’t understand why oysters can cause gastroenteritis-like symptoms. Through a flyer, we decided to simply explain why oysters can be host to human pathogens.
Communication
With other iGEM teams and with the general public, social media was our way of communication (linktree). Our Instagram page (see figure 1) was the place where we presented the team members, where we shared our project reveal and announced the most important events. Moreover, as we visited oyster farmers, we give them a flyer (see figure 2) to exmplain our project. We also did a presentation video (in English and French - see video 1) to explain to the general public and to the scientist of the "Centre de Biologie Structurale" of Montpellier what is iGEM and what is our project. This video was also used to convince people to participate to our crowdfunding. We shared this video on you tube . Finally, to communicate with students, we participated in several meetings to explain to them what iGEM is and what we did all along the summer.
