Public talks is one of the oldest forms of science outreach. Engaging in a public discourse while including key stakeholders helps to establish an open environment facilitating an effective dialogue between different interest groups of our society. For this reason, we were determined to organize a panel discussion on a highly topical and polemic subject with roots in synthetic biology — "Green biotechnology: The use of genetic engineering in agriculture".
In the time of global food shortages caused by climate change and various conflicts around the world it is important to open a discussion on possible solutions. Our team made sure to involve key stakeholders, representatives of various groups directly impacted by or involved in the debate about genetic engineering in agriculture in German society. To accomplish this, we invited six experts to take part in our panel discussion, moderated by two members of our team.
Green biotechnology is a highly political topic involving the discussion of public values. One of our panelists — Karl Bär — is a member of the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament, from the constituency of Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen/ Miesbach in Bavaria. He represents the Green Party, a current coalition party in Germany, and is an agricultural expert, serving on the Bundestag Committee on Food and Agriculture. His political insight was vital for a productive discussion on the topic.
A discussion on the use of genetic engineering in agriculture can not be rightly undertaken without the group that is directly affected by this subject: the farmers. Johann Graf is a farmer and a speaker in the Bavarian farmers' association, specializing in the topics of genetic engineering, risk management, and potatoes. He is also the managing director of "Bayerische Kartoffel GmbH", a joint initiative of Bavarian potato manufacturers and marketers and, subsequently, his personal perspective on the debate undeniably shaped its course.
Christian Kaiser, our third panelist, is a board member of the "Öko-Progressives Netzwerk e. V.", a nonprofit organization promoting eco-progressivism that works on evidence-based sustainability, focusing on agriculture and plant breeding. He is an experienced speaker who is regularly involved in educational outreach whose understandable and accessible explanations helped to include the audience members, regardless if they were experts or laypersons.
A further important perspective — that of science, which the topic of green biotechnology naturally requires — was provided by Dr. Anja Schneider, a Private Lecturer and Academic Senior Councilor at the Department of Biology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she conducts research in the field of plant sciences as a director of the research greenhouses at the LMU Biozentrum.
Dr. Schneider represented the position of science and presented the newest developments on the topic together with Dr. Anton Schäffner, a Private Lecturer and a Research Group Leader at the Institute of Biochemical Plant Pathology at Helmholtz Research Center in Munich.
Our last panelist was Dr. Christoph Then, a Managing director of Testbiotech, an NGO that deals with impact assessment and risk management in the field of biotechnology and tests threats for humans and the environment. His insight has broadened the spectrum of discussed subtopics, with some of the questions raised being the core of the debate in Germany.
As clearly outlined, our experts represent an extremely diverse group, both in terms of opinions and biases, as well as perspectives and insights. At the same time, the selection of panelists is well-balanced in terms of their stances on the subject, with the aim of ensuring a fair and open debate. Nevertheless it should be noted that a smaller panelist number would have allowed for longer individual contributions, which, in our discussion, never exceeded fifteen minutes.
The panel discussion took place on the 15th of September in an accessible, barrier-free venue with a parallel live stream available. We wanted to involve the audience by not only making sure to introduce and explain the topic in the beginning of the discussion, but also by including questions directed at the panelists from both in-person and online participants. With this approach, we aimed to facilitate the dialogue between different stakeholders and interest groups. A short resume as well as an abridged transcript of the panel discussion is available on the Communication page.
At the end of the discussion, audience members were invited to fill out a feedback sheet that later helped us with the evaluation of the event.
For the majority of our guests, the panel discussion was informative, resulting in respondents being more familiar and confident with the subject of green biotechnology after the debate. An absolute majority of the audience members also considered the discussed topic crucially important in the current context of worsening global food shortages, which served as a positive affirmation in our choice of the topic. Further, Respondents were able to share their personal positions on the various questions concerning the discussed topic, which showed us that our audience was, in general, very open to the idea of using genetic engineering in agriculture. However, according to the latest survey conducted by forsa (September 2021), the leading opinion polling company in Germany, 60% of the german public is against any genetic manipulations in agricultural products. This indicates that, despite our best efforts to reach out outside the academia environment, our audience was disproportionately in favor of green biotechnology. Still, we were happy to have a lively discussion on the topic with a well-balanced selection of panelists and a number of engaging questions from the audience, including some critical of the panelists’ positions.
We were happy to contribute to this open exchange of positions and perspectives on one of the most topical and controversial subjects in modern German society.
A passion for science with scientific education — this is what inspired us to initiate the iGEM@school program. It is for this reason that we reached out to a school specialized in social sciences and linguistics. Although the students at these schools in Germany can and often do choose an educational path in STEM after finishing high school, their curriculum often lacks even basic elements of a hands-on scientific education. The goal of our program was to spark these students' interest in science by providing this first-hand experience.
Our didactic objective for the program was to introduce the students to basic lab concepts and skills, have students dive into experiments that involve topics they are already familiar with through their daily lives, and deconstruct the science behind the practical experiments with carefully crafted explanations that build on their pre-existing knowledge. The students are provided with guidance on the process of scientific documentation and are given a space to analyze and critically discuss the produced results in a peer to peer manner. We have also placed great value in/put an emphasis on teaching skills and theoretical concepts relevant to our project, which heavily involves cell culture work.
For the content of our school outreach program we have consulted Dr. Burkhard Feigel of Infors. He has an extensive experience in scientific outreach, as he has been personally involved in designing and implementing a state-funded practical course for students of the biotechnological gymnasia (high schools) of Baden-Württemberg in cooperation with the University of Karlsruhe. As CEO of Infors, he has ensured that a low-cost option for a bioreactor is available, which the company rents out for educational purposes. The practical course featuring this fermenter was centered around the cultivation of yeast cells. Thus, inspired by the years of experience from this practical course, we have developed our own outreach program.
The school students first required crucial basic knowledge and skills for the designed experiments. Our program started with a preparation day: the students were introduced to the topic and the experiments, i.e. the practical part of the program; they were instructed on the lab safety guidelines and familiarized with key lab skills through a pipetting and diluting exercise.
For the practical part, the students were welcomed at our university campus. The experiments were centered around Saccharomyces cerevisiae — the "sugar mold from beer". The students were able to explore the morphology, life cycle, metabolism, and growth of the microorganism that was already familiar to them in their day-to-day life by joining/taking turns at different experiment stations throughout the day. On the first station a fresh yeast block was used as starter and the yeast culture was cultivated in a shake flask, with students measuring optical density of the culture at regular time intervals. The students were introduced to the growth conditions of S. cerevisiae, basics of growth media, the fundamentals of growth kinetics and the growth curve, as well as the concept of optical density measurements as an approximation for viable cell count. Additionally, we have cooperated with the Chair of Biochemical Engineering of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Weuster-Botz at our university. A member of the chair and a former iGEM participant (Team Aachen 2018) M.Sc. Arne Zimmermann has explained various cultivation methods to the students and their differences, mainly focusing on bioreactors he is using in his own research. On the second and the third stations, students could explore the basics of yeast metabolism. The stations were centered around glucose and ethanol measurements using coupled enzymatic tests. Students investigated the development of the concentration of these two substances in the cultivation shake flask culture. They learned about glycolysis, alcoholic fermentation and cellular respiration, as well as nuances of the overflow metabolism, Pasteur and Crabtree effects. Finally, the fourth station provided the students with an experience in microscopy. They were able to examine the structure of the yeast cell and witness its different stages of development. On this station students learned about optical microscopy as well as yeast morphology and its life cycle. In addition, they were invited to assess the reliability of optical density as a measurement for viable cell count by counting the cells in a counting chamber.
The newly acquired theoretical and experimental knowledge of the students was put into practice the day of the evaluation, where they were able to discuss and analyze the collected data. Students were encouraged to discuss the results in groups and to find interpretations and possible sources of errors that explained deviations from the expected results. Through collective efforts and with our guidance, the students documented the whole program by writing lab reports. We completed the program with an open feedback session.
OOrganizing and implementing this program, though focused on the education of the new generation of scientists, has taught us a lot about educational outreach. Through our own efforts and through exposure, we learned how to successfully realize such outreach endeavors involving school students, their teachers, and their school administrations, as well as how to direct laboratory management for our university and what obstacles can hinder it. We have improved our didactical skills and in future would set a more flexible time frame for our school projects, allowing more time for pauses and interpersonal communication, as well as a simple time buffer. From the feedback of the students we have also realized that the value of our outreach program is not reflected by the number of students who were inspired to pursue a tertiary education in STEM, but rather in the number of students who, through the program, were able to construct new opinions and discover personal preferences. It was as important for those students who realized that they enjoyed lab work as it was for those who came to the conclusion that the theoretical background of life sciences was actually what interested them the most.
The final important aspect of this educational outreach for us was making a sustainable change. We aspire for our program to spark interests in scientific fields for even more school students. Thus, we have provided all of the produced educational material as well as implementation instructions used in this outreach program on our Communication page. We also focus on presenting an accessible and affordable, school-ready version of the program on this page by building on the accomplishments of previous iGEM teams. Additionally, we have collaborated with the local school outreach group, offering a program spanning a full academic year, designed to promote the biochemistry study program of our university — GoBioChem. Our practical course centered around S. cerevisiae is going to be included in this year's program and we are providing the team behind GoBioChem with the required chemicals and our experiences to aid them in implementing it. Furthermore, we intend to help popularize educational outreach in our community. Sabrina Graf from Münchner Merkur, Munich's daily newspaper with over 150 000 subscribers, is writing a report about our team and the iGEM@school program.
In order not only to inform members of our university of the iGEM competition, but also to engage with our fellow students and faculty members in a new way and invite them to become a part of the iGEM community, we have reached out to record an episode of our university's podcast series "We are TUM". The series is designed to highlight people who make up our university. Our key objective is to familiarize listeners with the subject of synthetic biology, emphasize the fundamental aspects, goals and values of iGEM, and present the history of iGEM teams at our university. We were happy to record this podcast at the beginning of August and are eager for the release of the episode after the start of the new academic term (17.10.2022) to reach out to new students.
In an effort to engage in the dialogue with the German scientific community and to reach life science professionals in academia and industry, we have contributed to the presentation of the German iGEM teams by BIOspektrum with an article about our project. BIOspektrum is a scientific journal with an overview of new developments in molecular biology, biochemistry, microbiology, genetics and developmental biology. It is published on a bi-monthly basis in collaboration with prominent life science societies and organizations and has over 15 000 regular readers. The fifth edition of the journal features a traditional presentation of fourteen German teams competing in iGEM this year. We were excited to learn more about innovative synthetic biology endeavors and projects undertaken by this year's teams and are grateful to the editorial board of BIOspektrum for the opportunity to connect with the German life science community.
Download the collected articles here or view our article locally.
Together with team Barcelona_UB, we took to social media as a platform to reach new audiences. In a series of instagram posts we aimed to raise awareness about oncology and cancer, uniting both of our teams' project topics. We have joined forces to address oncogenics and oncoproteomics and their role in the development of emerging cancer treatments. You can read more about this social media campaign on our Collaboration page.
In addition to outreach and educational activities we also greatly value multifaceted communication within the iGEM community. Members of our team were eager to take part in the European Meetup in Hamburg this year. During the weekend, we were able to establish and foster friendships with fellow German and European iGEM teams, discover and discuss our projects during the poster presentations, brainstorm on collaboration ideas, engage in an open discourse on scientific, ethical and societal topics, and acquire new skills in the workshop sessions. We are grateful to the team Uni-Hamburg for organizing such an eventful meetup!
For more details visit Team Hamburgs Meetup website.