Communication

Outreach, Education, & Communication

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Though the technical work of our project makes up for its success, it is essential to make sure our work is responsible within our research and innovation. This involves being aware of the different ways our project could impact individuals from different backgrounds, encouraging us to ensure that the intended purpose and use of our project is received correctly. As developers of a product, our team has a vision of the outcomes we want our end-users to obtain, but to be able to receive those benefits - in our case, increased food security and a way for citizens to contribute to sustainable production and consumption systems - we must carry out additional efforts that enforce these values. Therefore, we have focused around half of our outreach projects on strengthening the outcomes we would like to evoke through education.

While we ensure our project is technically sound, we must also emphasize its purpose and intent, in order for our target end-users to be ready to receive this novel innovation. The second half of our outreach activities are centered around making sure our audience can access our innovation correctly. Since our product is centered around genetically modified foods, we want to ensure our end-users are as open as possible to the possibility of consuming GMOs. Secondly, developing this project as a Canadian team puts us at a disadvantage of benefitting North American farmers, even though we are targeting small-scale farmers that are unable to recover from large yield losses of wheat throughout the world. While acceptability of synthetic biology innovations across the world is a topic we aim to address, there is also an inequality in how accessible it is to carry out synthetic biology processes due to lack of resources and infrastructure in certain countries^[1]. This prevents countries from, for example, innovating and engineering agriculture in a similar manner that is more tailored to their needs if they are inspired from our project. Hence, we also wanted to increase accessibility to synthetic biology to carry across the world.

Product Development Goals

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Food Security

The main vision of our project is to increase food security by creating more reliable crops that have less yield variability in response to varying temperatures. As such, we wanted to reflect this vision not only through the technical work our team was conducting, but also through aiding other efforts with this same goal, especially considering that enhancing wheat food security is a small piece in the context of the larger problem. In searching for local initiatives that aid food security of our community in crops other than wheat, we came across the Yard Garden Harvest Project, a community garden meant to increase food security. One of the main facets of food insecurity is the lack of access to nutritious foods due to their increased prices in comparison to less nutritious food. In addition to this, urbanization results in even more decreased access to fresh produce since it decreases opportunities to create personal gardening and agricultural practices for families. Community gardens can battle this facet of food insecurity through offering free nutritious alternatives, making a balanced diet more accessible to the community^[2]. This reaches the same goal as our project of being able to increase the “reliability” of certain food types in people's diets.

Through volunteering with the Yard Garden Harvest Project with actions such as garden maintenance and interaction with the local community to raise awareness about the garden, we were able to increase food security in our vicinity, which we also hope to achieve with the completion of our project.

Ensuring Responsible Production & Consumption

As outlined in our Sustainable Development Goals page, we are happy that the development of our project contributes to sustainable production and consumption systems. The premise of our project involves generating wheat for human consumption in a manner that produces less biomass loss, therefore a more sustainably produced variety of wheat than one that would make poorer use of resources through increased biomass loss. Even though our project itself contributes to this SDG, a significant amount of effort towards reaching the SDGs is increasing education around them to encourage others to pursue them as well. As such, we wanted to raise awareness of admirable strategies individuals have implemented to address this SDG, and inspire others to do the same. For this reason, we launched our ongoing podcast: "Sustainable Development in Synthetic Biology", launching three episodes with representatives from both industry and academia working on varying approaches to reach this SDG. We acknowledge that promoting this podcast within Canada might mostly reach already-educated individuals that are aware of the SDGs, while our goal is to increase awareness of what activities can be done to reach the SDGs to individuals who are less aware of them. As such, we have been actively encouraging the podcast's promotion across four continents through sharing it with the network created from our International Accessibility Panel (details below).

End-User Goals

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Apart from the goals we had as product developers on the product features we wanted to provide to our consumers, the end-users needed to be ready to accept this innovation for our desired goals as product developers to be fulfilled. Our product will be able to ensure food security and support sustainable production systems, only if our end-users consume it appropriately and evade misuse of our technology. To ensure this, we wanted to strengthen GMO acceptability as well as the accessibility of synthetic biology innovations like ours across the world. In order to gauge how our product may be perceived by consumers, we explored the discourse around the ethics of genetically modified crops and the acceptance of similar synthetic biology innovations globally.

GMO Acceptance:

"Let's Talk GMO" Panel

Though the scientific aspects of our project seem cut and clear in order to increase sustainability by increasing heat tolerance in wheat, we understand that if this technology is not accepted by the public, it serves minimal purpose. The society plays an imperative role in any form of research undertaken as they are the end users of the product. Lack of public acceptance results in the inability to use the developed technology which thereby serves no purpose. As such, we wanted to dig deeper into understanding the societal, ethical, and social implications of gene editing as well as understanding the public perceptions of genetically modified organisms. The aim of this virtual panel was to educate the general public regarding the benefits and drawbacks of GMO foods via a meaningful discussion from a group of experienced panelists ranging from social scientists and philosophers to corporate professionals.

To engage further with our audience and to evaluate the educational outcomes of our ‘Let’s Talk GMO’ discussion panel, our team gathered data from participants in the form of a survey. According to participants’ anecdotes, the panel prompted audience members to think critically and openly about the responsibility associated with working with genetically modified organisms. Participants mentioned that they had the chance to hear different perspectives on the use of GMOs and learned that considering societal context is important when using GMOs as a tool to address real-world issues such as climate change.

Our audience consisted of a mixture of people ranging from students belonging to the iGEM community to those who had never heard of synthetic biology before. Our team guided the discussion by asking the panelists questions about various GMO-related topics but also let the conversation grow naturally as the panelists discussed and debated amongst themselves. There were opposing arguments in terms of the use and safety of GMOs in a broader societal context. There was a general consensus that concerns surrounding GMOs were at an all time low; however, simply weighing in the benefits along with the risks is not valid the way it may be in medicine. The goal of educating people should be based on a more bottom-up approach in the modern era rather than top-down. We need to find a way where the scientists' voices are heard more as they are the most trusted amongst the public as opposed to the government. The panel and question period were recorded and distributed to everyone who attended so they could also share it and generate further discussion.

The C.O.D.E. Initiative Foundation

Our two panel discussions brought to light the importance of a correct understanding of synthetic biology and how it can be utilized to tackle problems in an environmental or medical setting. Our team had the opportunity of providing learning resources to children and youth to learn more about GMO perspectives by starting a biology and genetics-based workshop series in partnership with The C.O.D.E. Initiative Foundation called “Bits of Bio: The Science of Life”.

The C.O.D.E Initiative Foundation is a Vancouver-based, non-profit organization that provides affordable one-on-one and group, virtual and in-person, workshops for both neurodivergent and neurotypical students on various topics in STEM. Although the organization already offers many different courses on coding and robotics, there was a gap in topics geared towards the life sciences. We developed and taught an engaging module introducing the basic concepts of biology, providing students with an interesting and strong foundational introduction to the topic. As misconceptions about synthetic biology often stem from misinformation, our goal is to create an opportunity for youth to gain a holistic introduction to biology. We publicly share access to our teaching materials and curriculum, which we used to successfully pilot our virtual, 1:1 workshops with several neurodivergent students.

The Melius Mentorship Network

To further extend our public outreach and to advocate for the accessibility of STEM for everyone, our team collaborated with a youth-run organization to empower people of all educational and ethnic backgrounds while exposing them to an innovative world of science and technology opportunities.

The Melius Mentorship Network is a student-led, non-profit organization at the University of British Columbia (UBC), which aims to provide personalized mentorship and educational workshops for refugee youth and newcomers to Canada. Our team carried out a hands-on, biology-based workshop to high school immigrants and refugees, educating them about the utility of synthetic biology research and providing a look into the molecular world of DNA and its modifications. We facilitated a DNA extraction activity and a gene editing activity, where they had to solve real-world problems through designing organisms with novel features. We included examples from the real world, such as the production of Golden Rice. Given the nature of their status in Canada, the hands-on activities were especially appreciated due to language barriers. The seven students demonstrated enthusiasm and admiration for the field of biological engineering after the session, inquiring about paths one can take to incorporate this into their career.

Access to Synthetic Biology Innovations:

"International Accessibility to Synthetic Biology Innovations" Panel

Inspired by our discussion with professionals working in the biotechnology sector and academic researchers from around the world throughout the project, we wanted to gain further insight on the barriers to accessing biotechnology innovations across the globe. If our technology becomes inaccessible to certain regions of the world, it will not reach certain target audiences that are affected by the issue we are trying to address. It was highlighted in our GMO panel that an individual’s educational background and their environment are major contributors to their opinion on the use of synthetic biology as a solution to the climate crisis and its subsequent effects such as food insecurity. The goal was to learn about the obstacles professionals from various countries face in the realm of synthetic biology, and contrast the network and environment support between different countries to understand how developing countries can improve this ecosystem. Ultimately, we wanted our technology to reach all corners of the globe regardless of accessibility issues related to GMO development and use. To reach this goal, we created a panel discussing the differences in GMO use in different countries in collaboration with the IISER Pune iGEM team from India.

Speakers from South America, North America, Asia, and Africa at different stages in their professional career were invited to answer questions and provide insight on their experiences. When discussing the legal framework for biotechnology in each country, there was a common theme among the speakers from Uganda, Peru, and India that a clear set of laws and regulations for synthetic biology had yet to be set, which acts as a barrier when seeking approval of novel projects. The large disparity in the accessibility to equipment and funding in each country was also brought to light, from Uganda, where there are little to no synthetic biology education opportunities, to Canada, where there is a vast number of opportunities that lie within academia and industry. In most speakers’ experiences, spreading awareness about synthetic biology was exclusively carried out by students, start-up companies, and community labs. It became evident that there is a need for a standardized regulatory system and government support to allow for the growth of sub-biotechnology sectors in developing countries.

We also gathered survey data from participants who attended this panel discussion to hear about the educational outcomes for the audience and to better facilitate future education-related initiatives. Participants mentioned that they had the opportunity to learn about biofoundries and maker labs through the panel discussion; the audience also found it useful to learn about barriers to synthetic biology in different geographical regions and developing countries. Overall, participants found the discussion to be insightful and educational.