Team:British Columbia/Public Outreach
Collaborating with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to Promote Marine Toxin Detection
To gain more insight on how shellfish toxins are tested in the regulation office, and to establish connections with government agencies, 
the UBC iGEM team visited the laboratory of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) in Burnaby, British Columbia. (more detail on our visit can be found in Integrated Human Practices)
After our visit, the director of CFIA Burnaby Laboratory, Ms. Carolyn Bateman, kindly offered the opportunity of publishing a story on our project and our team on the CFIA Chronicle, a newsletter that provided updates on the CFIA's activities and highlighted some of the changes they have underway.
"It's good to know the Agency's challenge has received engagement by academia as well as small businesses in Canada," says Bateman.
Geering Up Summer Camp
The UBC iGEM team is also passionate about delivering the idea of genetic engineering and synthetic biology to the public. To that end, we collaborated with Geering Up, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting science, engineering and technology to the children and youth of British Columbia through fun, innovative, and hands-on activities. During the summer, we met with groups of grade 7 - 12 students who were interested in STEM and delivered two workshops on the basic theories of genetic engineering and inspired their interests in the impact of genetic modification to human society.
To prepare for the workshop, we designed innovative genetic engineering games where students needed to address the hypothetical scenarios via synthetic biology and genetic modification. The idea of the game was to allow students to think creatively and thoroughly about what was the problem and how to combine different biobricks to handle the problem. On top of that, we also prompted a discussion on the CRISPR designer baby, on how to draw the boundary of genetic modification for scientific studies and medical uses.
