Our Strategy of good science communication

Our developed strategy of good science communication was based on the idea of educating people in different areas. We wanted to give them the opportunity to learn about synthetic biology and thus arouse their curiosity - whether at school, in the lab or in their free time.
The main focus of our developed plan was on young people. The importance of this is due to the fact that their decisions and attitudes will clearly determine the future of synthetic biology. Educating young people about synthetic biology starts with proper teaching in school and ends in their free time. Our focus was to show the possibilities that synthetic biology offers and to help understanding the mechanisms and methods behind it. We wanted to arouse the curiosity of future young researchers and thus have a positive impact on the future and the associated opportunities for innovation in synthetic biology.

Outreach and education of young people

To reach young people, we gave a lecture on synthetic biology lecture at a school. It was an interactive presentation about synthetic biology in general. Moreover, possible applications, benefits and risks were discussed. An insight into laboratory work of our iGEM project as well as the study of biology was provided. After the presentation, we discussed a simple experiment with the students and provided a small set of instructions for a simple school experiment. In order to reach young people in their free time, we educated them about synthetic biology on Instagram on a weekly basis over a period of five months. Every Monday, a biology-related meme was posted under the hashtag #MemeMonday. Our goal was to catch the attention of young people and provide a change of pace from the otherwise very informative initial posts. Every Thursday, a technique from the lab was featured under the hashtag #TechniqueThursday. The focus was mainly on molecular biology or project related methods - e.g. PCR, sequencing methods, CRISPR Cas9 gene editing. It is our belief that insight into genetic engineering methods will give people more confidence in trusting these techniques. Every Sunday an interesting scientific publication was discussed. This was summarized and visually presented in a post which was created by team members. The topics ranged from "genetically engineered bacteria for the treatment of chronic non-healing wounds" to "optogenetics" and "CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing for cancer therapy". Our hope with these posts is to provide a simple insight about current topics in science and thus also to show that genetic engineering is a very current and hopeful area of biology. Besides activities on our own Instagram account, we got the opportunity to present our project in a video on the Promega Instagram account and therefore give their followers an insight into our lab by taking over the account for a day. Also, our university published videos created by us in their story and thus enabled an outreach via social media to all students of our university.

#IchbinHanna

Science communication is not always just about reporting on the great side of science. That's why we have also made it our duty to report on the perhaps not so dazzling part of science. In Germany, the conditions for scientists are still critically questioned. For example, most people in science are employed on a temporary basis, and employment in a temporary position is restricted by law. The majority of teachers at German universities work full time at 50% pay and are constantly subject to the constraints of job hunting and frequent relocation. Such factors impact the quality of teaching and supervision. Under the hashtag #IchBinHanna, academics at German universities report on their precarious working conditions in academia to draw attention to them. To raise awareness, we published posts about #IBinHanna on our iGEM Instagram account. In these posts we reported about, the underlying law, consequences for teachers/students, possible courses of action, as well as the latest reformation proposals.

All posts made on Instagram are freely available for reuse and can be found here: Instagram posts.

Safety-Kit

In addition to doing a lot of work on social media, we've been thinking about how to educate people in the lab. Therefore, we have developed a Safety-Kit, which is freely available for download. With the help of this, all the important rules for working safely in a lab can be clearly displayed. The safety-Kit is freely available for reuse and can be found here:
English Version   German Version.

Cancer awarenness campaign

We also dedicated ourselves to the big topic of cancer. For this we started an awareness campaign on Instagram. When we realized the scope of the project, we partnered with TOKYI ASJI to work together on the campaign. In collaboration with other iGEM teams we spread awarenness about different types of cancer. In the meetings with the teams, as well as through the awareness campaign, we were able to educate about the importance of detecting esophageal cancer quickly and about the symptoms of this type of cancer, which can often be mistaken for symptoms of harmless diseases. More details about the awareness campaign can be found here: Partnership.

Additional projects

In several small projects we could educate in collaboration with other iGEM teams. For the International Lymphoma Day we made a post on LRCHL (Lymphocyte-rich classical Hodgkin lymphoma), which was published by iGEM Barcelona. Furthermore, we wrote a German translation for the promotion video of the iGEM team from Hong Kong and also translated a blog article about synthetic biology from iGEM Chalmers Gothenburg. With this we made both accessible for people who only understand German. The iGEM team CUHK-Hong Kong-SBS ATREUS and the iGEM team CityUHK jointly publish contributions under the hashtag SynBioOTD. We have contributed with posts on molecular biology techniques under this hashtag. More details to all of these projects can be found here: Collaborations. Additionally, with the help of several articles written by us about our project (in BIOspektrum Magazine, on the website of our university, on the Eurofins Genomics website), we could reach a wider range of people.