Education & Communication

Education

Education was an essential puzzle piece to our project. Since IBD NanoBiotics is a novel approach harnessing a mode of action unknown to the general public, it was important for its future implementation and for us personally to narrow the gap between the broad society and science. These efforts will contribute to developing an evidence-based relationship between researchers and the general public. By implementing this philosophy, we hope to increase the acceptance of GMOs. Since bacteria and GMOs often do not have a good reputation, our goal was to educate the general public about their benefits and remove some potential fears that come with them. The best way to pass our innovative thinking and revolutionary approach to how a new treatment should look, is to integrate the next generation in its development. To complete this mission, we contacted multiple school teachers to offer them a workshop about synthetic biology and GMOs designed by us. We also focused on the youngest generation of students by visiting different primary school classes and teaching lessons about bacteria, their biology and their functions. Lastly, it was essential to introduce the next generation of researchers to the scientific thinking patterns that focus on identifying a problem, analyzing it and coming up with possible solutions.

How much do you know about our digestive system?

Workshops with primary school students

We started our education efforts by targeting the youngest students in elementary schools. It was essential for us to include children in our educational efforts. Gladly, we got the opportunity to visit three primary school classes whose teachers agreed to give us some time to conduct our designed workshop. The human practices team designed these workshops to engage children's curiosity and motivation. Therefore, our workshops contained interactive presentations and hands-on sessions. The topic of our workshops centred on the anatomy and the function of the digestive system in humans. It provided us with the necessary framework to zoom in and introduce the microbiota as the inhabitants of the gut, together with its essential functions for our wellbeing. Hence, the workshops started with an introduction to food digestion, and we made sure to include some astonishing facts like that the gut surface can reach up to 400 m²! Since the students were very inquisitive, we got many interesting questions like "How is it possible that we are not five meters tall even though our small intestine is five meters long?". It was a great experience introducing bacteria for the first time to them and explaining the importance of DNA that we compared to an instruction manual to build a toy. We also included some other bacterial features and designed a worksheet to solidify the taught concepts. Afterwards, the students had time to handcraft their bacteria with materials we provided them, such as balloons, cardboard and colourful paper. We are so proud of the results! Furthermore, we discussed the importance of hand washing and how to fight against dangerous bacteria. To make this topic more understandable for young students, we included an easy experiment with the aim of seeing the bacteria from their hands growing on an agar plate. For this experiment, every agar plate was divided in half, and in the first field, the children made a fingerprint without washing their hands. Afterwards, they washed their hands with soap and put a fingerprint in the second field. After one week, they were able to observe the bacteria and see the difference in the growth between the two areas. These plates contained only agar, which is why they could dispose of them in the regular trash afterwards. We had very much fun with the primary school children and are thankful to their teachers for giving us this fantastic opportunity!

Workshops with high school students

We continued our education-centred workshop series by developing a workshop for high school students. We had the opportunity to conduct these workshops at the Life Science Learning Center(LSLC) of the University of Zurich. The LSLC is a unique place to enable young pre-university students with hands-on learning experience about science. We took this opportunity to introduce our project to high school students and how it is shaped by synthetic biology. Further, we wanted to teach them a selection of basic essential laboratory techniques such as pipetting or working as sterile as possible. Additionally, we integrated some of the experiments we had to perform ourselves as part of our iGEM project, such as restriction digestion and gel electrophoresis. We wanted to ensure that students could experience the workflow of introducing new genetic material in bacteria and how we can “custom design” it. Therefore, subsequent to a theoretical introduction, we performed a transformation experiment with the aim to insert a red fluorescent (RFP) carrying plasmid in a transformation competent E. coli strain. In the end, they could draw on agar plates with their transformed bacteria and other bacteria strains which we prepared beforehand with differently coloured fluorescent proteins. This last part of the workshop aimed to surprise them with an unusual task performed with bacteria. We wanted to deliver the idea of opening their mind towards applying new approaches to come up with innovative solutions like using bacteria instead of paint to create a piece of art, just as we came up with a genetically modified organism to dampen inflammation.

Introducing high school students to scientific thinking

In addition to designing laboratory workshops for high school students, we wanted to implement another format that allowed us to conduct our teaching directly in a high school classroom. We had the opportunity to visit a grammar school specializing in natural sciences in Zurich. It was important for us to be still able to integrate some hands-on sessions for our lessons to give the students a feeling of what laboratory work is about. Our experience with the high school workshops at the LSLC showed that painting with colourful bacteria was highly effective at delivering the message of using new solutions to current problems. Therefore, we included this experiment in our onsite teaching sessions as well. Besides the experiment, we integrated an interactive presentation about synthetic biology and bridged its use into the biomedical research field by presenting what we were aiming to do with our iGEM project. We were happy to answer questions about how our chassis was engineered and why it differs from an unmodified E. coli Nissle 1917. The core piece of this new education format included a 30-minute session to brainstorm and analyze a problem to which a synthetic biology-driven approach should help develop a novel solution. We simulated a small iGEM competition where the students pitched their project, and the best pitch won a bag of chocolate! The students were very creative and came up with projects to treat Alzheimer’s disease or multiple sclerosis and an approach to gaining muscles without training!

Communcation

Besides educating the general public, we have engaged in the communication of our project among our peers and an expert on synthetic biology. Our communication aims were to understand how our project is perceived and discuss relevant questions that arise when using synthetic biology as a tool in research and how to implement their answers in our work.

About the ethics of synthetic biology

Currently, in Switzerland, there is no approved treatment option based on a GMO. This fact shows how pressing the need is to inform the public about the risks and benefits of GMOs to openly allow the discussion if using them should be allowed or not. This issue is very relevant for us since we aspire to use them as a therapeutic option. Therefore, the need to address the ethics behind synthetic biology is urgent. We teamed up with the organization Reatch, who included us in their event sessions dedicated to philosophy and science. We organized a discussion evening on the topic of synthetic biology in medicine together with Prof. Stefano Vavassori, an expert in synthetic biology in the biomedical field. His presentation helped the participants gain essential knowledge of what synthetic biology is and what kind of potential use it can have. This introduction fed into the discussion of multiple questions related to synthetic biology applications. We addressed questions like “Are we entitled to play God and modify species to our liking?”, “What does it mean to release a GMO in the environment?” and “What if these new technologies are misused for criminal purposes?”. The discussion was engaging and essential in the context of our project. The general consensus is that scientific progress should be openly communicated and society should consider ways to counteract possible misuse by laying the techniques openly available.