Education and Engagement

Throughout the iGEM period our team had a heavy focus on education and engagement. We wanted to educate people about our project and the issue we were handling, while also spreading awareness about iGEM and synthetic biology in general. To achieve this we did interviews and held lectures as well as a seminar about synthetic biology. Our work is described in more detail below.

Radio Interview

On July 2nd two of our team members were interviewed by the local radio station Sveriges Radio P4 Göteborg. We discussed the iGEM concept itself and how iGEM can be a good complement to our education in biotechnology. We described our project idea and design, but also how the local environment became an inspiration for our project. One aim of the interview was to make people aware of the problem with PCBs in our marine environment and how it affects different living organisms. Synthetic biology and GMO in general can often be perceived as something negative and for this reason our interview was focused around describing why synthetic biology and GMO can be used to solve an environmental problem such as increased concentration of PCBs in our waters.

We discussed the future aspects of our project and what a possible product could look like. In addition, we emphasized the imporance of human practiecs for our project, how different companies and organizations are important to the development of our project and the improvement of our knowledge about the problem. We discussed the problem with PCBs and how it affects our environment. Another aim of the interview was to describe our project in a way that is easily understandable for the people living in Sweden, who do not have in-depth knowledge about synthetic biology and GMOs. People have contacted our team members after the interview and thanked us for giving the environmental problem of lingering PCBs a thought, and also complimented us for being able to describe how we work in the lab and how we can use synthetic biology to solve different problems in a way that they understood. If you know Swedish, you can listen to the interview here.

AstraZeneca's Summer School for Young Scientists

Unga forskare (Young scientists) is an organization that hosts a summer school about science every year for students in the ages of 14 to 16 years old in both Stockholm and Gothenburg. We got the opportunity to have a lecture and seminar session with the students during the summer school in Gothenburg. We introduced the students to the basic concepts of synthetic biology and how it can be used to solve different problems in our community. The seminar session was divided into three parts, each with a different focus. First, the students discussed what synthetic biology can be used for and what they thought could be the problem with the synthetic biology solution. In the second part we discussed different questions and problems in biotechnology from an ethical perspective. The questions dealt with the problems associated with introducing a new organism into established ecosystems, introducing new phenotypes into an organism, why GMOs are feared in our community, vaccination and a brief discussion on the moral status of different organisms. In the final part of the seminar session the students designed their own iGEM project. They came up with a problem in our community and discussed a possible solution to this problem using synthetic biology. Examples of the project ideas that they came up with include expressing medicine in fruit and modifying malaria to target leukemia cells as a cancer treatment.

After the seminar session we had another lecture for the students in which we presented our project and how we want to modify yeast to degrade PCBs. We also asked the students about what they thought could be different challenges for our project and if they thought this was a necessary environmental problem to solve. The goal with this lecture and seminar was to introduce the students to the concept of synthetic biology in a more interactive way compared to what they are used to. Introduce the students to iGEM, how they can be part of iGEM in the future and how they can use biotechnology to solve different problems in our community.

Lunch Lecture for Students at Chalmers University of Technology

The team hosted a lunch lecture with the Society for Biological Engineering Student Chapter Chalmers for the students at Chalmers University of Technology. Over 100 students attended the lecture, during which we presented our project and what we have done during our iGEM year in an attempt to increase the awareness and interest of iGEM at our university. We explained the iGEM competition and how it could be used as insight to the research field and how it looks like to work in a lab, but also how it can be adapted to do many other different things such as speak on national radio, create your own website, talk to different companies or use your artistic skills to create different figures and animations. The students in attendance were both master and bachelor students and could be a part of iGEM as soon as next year. We presented how our project could be a solution to the problem with PCBs in our waters but also presented how our brainstorming sessions looked like and what inspired us wen coming up with the project. Hopefully this event inspired some student to join iGEM Chalmers-Gothenburg next year.

Ethics Course Presentation

The team was invited to present our project to the students participating in the course Ethics in Biotechnology at Chalmers by the course examiners Carl Johan Franzén, associate professor in bioreactor engineering, and Karl de Fine Licht, professor in philosophy. After the presentation the students analyzed our project from an ethical perspective, crafting decision trees and argument structures around the project. They discussed the possibility of spreading GMOs and the consequences that our idea can have on ecosystems, were it to be implemented, but also how our project can lower concentrations of PCBs in our environment, which should be our moral obligation to increase the well-being of different organisms.

Interview for Oatly

Oatly is a Swedish company that produces and sells oat-based alternatives to dairy products, active in 22 countries. The company has expanded quickly and has had much success regarding their publicity and public relations projects. The trademark of their PR work has been transparency, honesty and an ambition to make the future a better place. As a part of this work they are running the project "Je ne sais quoi", a monthly award assigned to a project they think is making the world a better place. We were very excited to be awarded the "Je ne sais quoi" for November of 2019. This involved two of our team members being interviewed about our project, our iGEM experience and what we hoped would come from our work. The interview will be available on Oatly's website for months to come.

Social Media

Social media is a platform where you can easily reach many different people around the world, especially different iGEM teams. During 2019 our team wanted to expand our outreach, with a specific focus on instagram. We had the goal to increase our followers to get a more established platform from which we could expand the interest of synthetic biology and in that way increase the interest of iGEM among the students of Chalmers University of Technology, as well as on a larger scale. We started up our instagram by participating in iGEM Stony Brooks instagram challenge. The idea was to publish a post every day that fulfilled their instructions, some examples were agar art, make it the iGEM way and lab fails. We also participated in iGEMxSDGs challenge started by the collaboration between iGEM Tübingen, iGEM TAS_Taipei and iGEM Costa Rica. The idea was to show that our iGEM project is a step towards a sustainable future and that we are actively working for that to happen.

iGEM4ENVIRONMENT

Besides our collaboration with iGEM Queens Canada, iGEM Acibadem Istanbul and iGEM Copenhagen, we decided to start a challenge inside our team. We wanted to make the iGEM4ENVIRONMENT collaboration a daily thing and decided that the members of iGEM Chalmers-Gothenburg should pick up at least 5 pieces of trash every day, starting on July 1st. Since then the team has collectively picked up 4500 pieces of trash from the environment, while also challenging friends and family to follow our example to make this a larger initiative. On the world cleanup day 2019, our team participated in the event organized by "Håll Sverige rent", cleaning our environment together with other participants. Finally, we also joined the Gothenburg part of the global climate strike on September 27th.

Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg/Public Engagement