Everyone working in the field of synthetic biology has their own individual and very personal reasons that made them choose their profession and career path.
While some of us might have already known from their early childhood on, that they can picture themselves wearing a lab coat, others might have discovered their passion a little later along the way. No matter how long it took us to find our place in the scientific world, we all have an interesting and eventful story to tell about what got us here. At some point everyone has had their first encounter with synthetic biology or any other related science and got inspired to join in.
This is exactly why we think it is a fundamental part of iGEM and science in general to find a way to communicate with the public and educate people about the important work that we are doing.
Science should not happen behind closed doors, because in the end it is an act of service from a group of people to all other people in the world. For mutual understanding between scientists and the public, it is crucial to open a dialog and allow a fruitful exchange.
Sometimes the usage of scientific vocabulary can get in the way, therefore it is really important to pick others up from which point they are coming from and take the responsibility of educating the public about our work seriously.
This responsibility is not only important when it comes to raising the general understanding and awareness of scientific matters, but also to empower children, teenagers and young adults to become the new generation of scientists.
We as an iGEM team are still at the beginning of our journey, some a little further than others, but we still would love to inspire people, like we got inspired when we first started our academic path.
Therefore we chose different projects that combine all the aspects above and give us a platform to share everything about iGEM, our Team and our project SPEAR.
We hope we reached as many people as possible with our efforts and they could learn something interesting and new.
Girl´s and Boy´s Day
Raising awareness for science in the younger generation was especially a matter of heart for us this year. This is why we teamed up with the SFZ Hamburg again this year. The SFZ Hamburg is a center which was founded to enable children easy access to all kinds of sciences and offers workshops and weekly research group meetings.
We decided to organize a whole day full of various biomedical topics for 12 to 16 year old students. Together with the SFZ Hamburg we arranged that as many students could enter as their local capacity allowed.
In order to enable the students to get the day off school, this was part of the annual Girl’s and Boy’s Day, which takes place in April and is joined by many companies and organizations in Germany. The original idea behind the Girl’s and Boy’s Day was to allow young girls insights into professions that are socially still associated as professions for men. Our organized day was open for all genders to enter, so nobody would feel excluded. Still, we wanted to educate about the roles women have in science to this day.
That is why we invited Prof. Zoya Ignatova from the University of Hamburg for a talk about her career and her experience as a woman in science, which was followed by a Q&A and fun discussion. Of course we also took time to introduce our iGEM team and our project, so hopefully we could recruit some new team members for iGEM 2030.
Together with the students we also carried out a very fun experiment:
Isolating DNA from vegetables and fruit!
Overall everyone had a very fun day, a good experience and we are grateful for all the children that participated so well!
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Educational Video for YouTube
Even though some of our team members are already very advanced in their studies, we sometimes still need to look up a thing or two. After reading papers for hours a short educational video comes in handy.
A fellow student of one of our members has a great and easy-to-understand YouTube channel called Henrik’s Lab, which he uses to upload short explanatory videos about all kinds of scientific matters. For example he explains different methods or molecular pathways, helping the viewer to understand the underlying mechanisms and to potentially carry out their own protocols in the future. The channel’s audience is very mixed from the general public to master students or graduates.
We asked Henrik to cooperate with us on a video about the detection of antibiotic resistance.
This would not only compliment his portfolio of videos, but help us raise awareness for this public health threat and explain the limits and difficulties that come with the currently available methods.
The ultimate reason why we decided to develop SPEAR was because we were unhappy with the available methods and thought it would be possible to develop something faster, while still enabling accuracy.
Together with Henrik we wrote the script for the video and he was luckily able to turn our ideas into reality. In the video linked below you can not only hear Henrik himself in the VoiceOver, but also one of our team members.
We are very proud and already received lots of positive feedback about the video!
Science Meets Photography
In order to show people some impressions about how our iGEM Team Hamburg works in the lab, we asked a professional photographer for help. His name is Moses Omeogo, he is from Hamburg and he is a young aspiring photographer. He took photos not only of our workplace in the CSSB laboratory, but also of some experiments that we did. The idea was that he accompanied us during our workflow and then used the pictures to tell a visual story in order to communicate and give an understanding of how we work in the laboratory. This is especially valuable for people who do not have any kind of scientific background.
We chose to organize the photo sessions, because we think photography is an amazing art form, which is not only easy to consume but able to deliver a greater message at the same time.
Have a look at the great photos he took!
Colouring Comic
We've made a colouring comic for children. If you right click and open it in another window it can be printed over 4 A4 pages.
Article in Biospektrum and interviews
In order to further introduce our project to the public, we decided to publish an article regarding our project and general aspects about antibiotic resistances. We wrote about our approach using a Split Ribozyme for detecting antibiotic resistances. It was published in “BIOspektrum” which is a german magazine for biosciences by the society of biochemistry and molecular biology (in german: GBM). The magazine is being published every 2 months, has approximately 15,000 readers and gives an impression of the newest developments in biosciences. You can read it in german here
We were also interviewed and part of a scientific series in the german broadcast BR. You can listen to it in german here.
In our institute they are doing a news page as well, for which we gave an interview that you can find here
