Education & Public Engagment

"The beauty of Science is to make things simple"

Science has improved our lives in multiple ways - by combating deadly diseases, protecting the environment, and bringing all kinds of innovative gadgets to our working space and living room.

Yet, science starts with human dedication and understanding. Scientists have to realize the necessity for new scientific developments and also to understand the theory and methods that are essential to achieve scientific progress. This often requires the input from an informed public.

While this is certainly common sense and even studied ^[1], there is still the issue that many scientific papers and articles are written in an intricate or fragmentary manner. This is also the case with many iGEM abstracts. Thus we discussed this matter with an expert for science communication and did a survey about scientific communication, ultimately starting a collaboration.

Expert

Dr. Markus Große Ophoff

Markus Große Ophoff is a german chemist and the director of the Institution for Environment Communication at the German Federal Environmental Foundation. We had a productive interview with him about how to communicate science to people which don’t get in touch with science in their daily life. Furthermore we talked about the communication between scientist.

We invited Dr. Große Ophoff for an interview and a talk about science communication in the field of sustainability. The real influence on our project we gained from this interview, in which we elucidate possibilities on how we can communicate science to the public. Dr. Große Ophoff gave us the advice to use pictures and metaphors (like lock-and-key for protein ligand interaction) which are not too childish. He also advised us to use emotions, because our brain is programmed to store data longer, if it is linked to emotions, while raw facts are soon to be forgotten. A transcript of the full conversation can be found hereas well as the summary with all his advice in these guidelines.

Survey

We found that understanding scientific abstracts is hard especially for people who are not in on the topic. For this reason we designed a survey to research our hypothesis that people with no specific scientific background have trouble understanding scientific language.

Our survey asked about the age, education and if they’ve got an scientific background to get a picture of who answered our survey. Then we asked about the knowledge of certain scientific terms and the interest in science. The full survey form can be seen here: Version A, Version B. The survey was done in german and in english. Not all questions were evaluated for our guidelines. All the data has been handled confidently, and no personal data like names or heritage were asked for. The participants have been informed about their rights according the data protection regulations of EU^[2].

At first we were interested in who answered our survey as to better interpret the results (figure 1). Most of the participants were between 18 and 29, which means they had all the common education and the least distance between the learning and answering this survey. For education, most people had a degree not related with science, which goes with the result that just 35% said they had a scientific background. This makes our survey quite representative for non scientific people.

Coming to the more interesting questions: How is the knowledge of our participants? In figure 2 you can see the result. Shown in green is a really good knowledge (I can explain the term) whereas red means no knowledge (I’ve never heard of it). DNA is known very widely as expected, but most of the other terms are evenly distributed between knowledge and none. Remarkable for us was that green genetic engineering and CRISPR/Cas are that unfamiliar, we expected otherwise because of the many headlines both caused.

In figure 3 we saw that the interest overweighs the concerns. But it is good to see that there are some concerns, so ethics can’t be neglected! On the other side, everyone states that there lie chances in synthetic biology.

As many people are interested in science but have problems understanding scientific texts, we aimed to write iGEM abstracts more simple.

Worldmap

But the result of our survey shows clearly that a normal iGEM abstract is not suitable to be understood by everyone which makes it not open accessible for everyone. So we started a collaboration with many different iGEM teams and collected simplified abstracts and summarized them in a world map. For writing the simpler abstract, we provided them with a guideline (which can be found here).

For our own abstract we did a readability analysis for the original and the simplified. Several testers stated that the simple version is understandable and the original too complicated, because there are many technical terms in it. Additionally we did a analysis with a free readability calculator^[4]. The scores shown in figure 4 were much better for the easier version.

Public

Schülerforschungszentrum

We were also invited to the Schülerforschungszentrum Hamburg (a students research center located on the campus) to present iGEM. Here, motivated students from high school can realize their ideas and do some small research projects on their own. We held a short presentation about iGEM and answered all their questions. Throughout the year we provided the students with our expertise wherever we could. We even debated the possibility of starting an high school iGEM team with the responsible advisors, but since the students lab is not S1 secure yet, it was impossible to go further than debating.

Team:Hamburg/Public Engagement