Education & Science Communication

Overview

Based on our survey, we realized that many people don't know about genetic engineering technology and have some bias which will affect the public judging on accepting our final product. In addition, we would like to increase public awareness of biotechnology and encourage more people to pay attention to it so as to promote the advancement of synthetic biology. Besides, we also wanted to attract more people to our project and learn more about higher alcohols and focus more on health. Therefore, we decided to organize some lectures to provide intensive education of relative knowledge to the public, in addition, we also prepared several educational materials and outreach to the public online and offline. We hope our effort could contribute to the public attention on biosynthesis and the development of a scientific society.

Lecture: Biology Technology Introduction and Our Project Briefing

Since our project is targeting those drinking people thus we decided to only invite those people above 18. We booked a meeting room and designed a poster for inviting our audience.

Figure 1. Poster (left) of the lecture and some slides (right) of the lecture PPT

In this lecture, we first introduced our team and our project to the audience. In this part, we explained the harm of over-drinking higher alcohol which causes headaches and thirst and higher alcohol is exactly one of the main culprits to making drinking people feel sick. We also highlighted that it could cause more serious problems and even bring damage to the human body. At the end of this part, we suggested people drink less higher alcohol.

Figure 2. We presenting our project to the audience

At the second part of the lecture, we illustrated several basic but important bio-experiments, including PCR and Enzyme digestion. One of our wet lab members wore a new white experimental cloth so as to act more professionally and make the lecture more engaging. He was responsible for illustrating those experiments and also prepared some vivid pictures and a video that explained genetic engineering in a comprehensive but simple way since many of our audience don't have a relative knowledge base. All these will help our audience to understand more easily and make the whole lecture more engaging.

Bili Bili Live Lecture

Since many audiences couldn't be presented due to the long distance, we decided to make the lecture live in the meantime. After some investigation, we decided on the live platform, Bili Bili which is the most popular video platform in China and soon we registered a Bili Bili account to open a live broadcast room for our lecture.

Before the lecture began, we shared the link of our live broadcast room with those audiences who will attend this lecture online. We modified the camera and microphone to ensure the best experience for our online audience.

Figure 3. Bili Bili live broadcast room of our lecture

After the combined presentation of our dry lab and wet lab, we also prepared a Q&A section. Actually, we received a lot of questions and comments from the online audience, which were mainly about gene editing and higher alcohols, and our members answered them one by one, alleviating their concerns.

Educational Articles on the WeChat Official Account

We also set up our own WeChat Official Account so that people can read our articles and better understand our project. So far, we have received more than 260 reads. By allowing more people to know about us, we also forward through WeChat friends, so that more people can see and follow us. One of our articles is about how to use genetic engineering to protect the health of drinking. In this article, we introduced our project and detailed illustrated our experimental design, including how we set up our PCR system and how we verified our result. This article is aimed to reveal the secret of real gene editing in the laboratory and make the public feel closer to biotechnology.

Figure 4. Screenshot of our WeChat Official Account homepage (left) and the article (right): Use Genetic Engineering To Protect Healthy Drinking

Another article we posted on our WeChat Official Account is about higher alcohols. Based on our online questionnaire results, we realized that many people don’t know much about higher alcohols and their harm to human health. Therefore, we posted an educational article to introduce it.

Figure 5. Screenshot of article: “Science | Higher Alcohols”

In this article, we started with the basic chemical information about higher alcohols, then we listed several applications for using higher alcohols, including plasticizers, emulsifiers, and industrial solvents, etc. Following that we came to talk about the higher alcohols in wine which is the sub-product during wine fermentation, we mentioned that the appropriate content of higher alcohols in wine will produce a special flavor but it will also ruin the flavor if the content is too high. so in addition to that part, we specially explained the harm of higher alcohols to the human body, including headaches, vomit and feeling sick, even causingirritation to eyes and nose. The toxicity will increase by the content of higher alcohols intaken by the human body. In the end, we concluded that the content of higher alcohols in wine shall be controlled and we should pay more attention to it when drinking. We hope this article could raise the public notice of higher alcohols and care more about health.

Booklet

We also planned to communicate with the public face-to-face, so we designed a popular science booklet that introduced iGEM, our project, higher alcohols, and synthetic biology technology in detail. In this way, we can carry them when we conducted our outside tasks to help better communicate with the public and we could send them to those people who are interested in our project so that they could take time to learn more from the booklet.

Figure 6. We printed out several popular science booklets

Promotion and Communication During Fundraising

During the fundraising campaign, we came to the public, not only promoted our project with our posters, flyers, and peripheral goods customized with our team logos on them but also talked to our buyers about what our team is working on. After this campaign, we successfully attracted more attention to our team and our project. We discussed the project with passers and they also provided their thoughts and opinions as well as bought our peripheral goods in responding to our outreach.

Figure 7. We promoted our project to passers and communicated with them

Communication with the Public During Offline Survey

In order to know the public's opinion on our technology, our dry lab was divided into different groups and conducted an offline survey in different locations. During the survey, we explained to the public what higher alcohols are, and what are genetic engineering and synthetic biology techniques. Through our presentations, we also dispelled some people's misconceptions about genetic engineering, and they showed great enthusiasm for our project.

Figure 8. We communicated with the interviewees when we conducted offline survey