Team:CMUQ/Public Engagement
Outreach
Compass International School
Our community outreach event for 9th graders was carried out at Compass International School. Members of our outreach team along with our advisor, introduced the basics of genetics and genetic diseases to eager fourteen year olds. With our project focussing on tackling the prevalence of genetic diseases in Qatar, the aim of the event was to teach students exactly how these diseases arise. In order to do this we took on two strategies; an interactive lecture and a practical session using C. Elegans worm models. The lecture focussed on introducing the idea of recessive and dominant diseases, the genetic basis of them and introducing pedigrees to illustrate how genes can travel through generations. The practical session depicted mutated C. Elegans with various genetic diseases to illustrate the difference between phenotype and genotype. This outreach event also briefly introduced the science behind our project and highlighted how it hopes to tackle the problem at hand.
Qatar Academy
The outreach even targeted high school students attending Qatar Academy to give them an insight into our project for this year. The students first attended a lecture about genetics and genetic diseases, followed by an interactive lab session where they got to witness and apply what they gained from the lecture on C Elegans affected with the following diseases Mary disease, Osteo, and Diabetes; as the students were tackling their assigned tasks in the lab, they were getting more familiar with several genetic cases, including dominance of alleles, arising of diseases and more. Then, students were introduced to iGEM, and briefly learned about our project for this year. Finally, after familiarizing them with using OMIM, a Q&A session was held for them to use the website to find facts about several genetic diseases.
CMU-Q Summer College Preview Program
The outreach team reached out to high school students in their final year of school in order to get feedback on the design and application of our team’s iGEM project. The students were first introduced to our project; we especially focussed on the problem of recessive diseases in Qatar. In addition to how genetic diseases arise, we introduced them to the details of our project and how the mechanics of the device works from a biological standpoint. We then opened the floor for discussion on the social and ethical impact of our group’s work. This was run in small focus groups of six to seven students. A scribe and discussion facilitator guided the discussion by asking scenario based questions that demanded ethical thought from the students. Overall, the outreach event succeeded in gaining perspective on society’s views on the device and the potential problems it might face in the market.
Debate: Love, genes, and human beings
One of the outreach events was a debate in collaboration with CMUQ’s debate club and iGEM Lund Team. The debate was “love, genes, and human beings”, and the panels included CMUQ students of different majors, professors, and staff. The debate had a handful of purposes that were successfully fulfilled, including gaining insight and opinions on ethical questions regarding biology and genetic engineering, introducing iGEM as a competition to the CMUQ community and highlighting its interdisciplinary aspect, and getting as many responses as possible for a social feedback survey. The debate included 2 questions for participants as well as the audience to share their thoughts. The first round question was “Would you go for love or the genes? “ in which people shared their opinions of whether someone should be more aware of genes Compatibility or of feelings and emotions when choosing a partner. As for the second round question, it was “Should intelligence, memory, empathy, conscientiousness, and physical strength be altered via genetic engineering? Should they be available to everyone?”, which was more to question the ethics of synthetic genetics and genetic engineering.
