Our team believes that a young mind is most open to learning and any impression made on one will last for years. In accordance with this, we set out to make learning experiences as engaging and insightful as possible, to give students a glimpse of the satisfaction that a career in research can provide.
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom”
-Isaac Asimov
Open day
IISc is open to the general public on 23rd March every year. Open Day is organized to showcase research in the Indian Institute of Science and to communicate important concepts in science and engineering to the general public. Hundreds of students from every department in IISc set up stalls to showcase and exhibit their research. The purpose is to make the general public enthusiastic about science. Team iGEM-IISc Bangalore also had a stall wherein we introduced people to synthetic biology and also tried to reduce the social stigma associated with genetically modified organisms. We also explained the last year’s project and the possible ideas we were working on for this year. One of the posters we exhibited is shown here. We also raised some funds by selling merchandise.
Speaking to students
When we look at the school curriculum of India, it is startling to note that there is almost no mention of synthetic biology. Some great human once said that if one wants to make a change in society, one must target young minds. Thus, considering this, we focused most of our Human Practices endeavors on high school students. We went to schools around Bangalore and explained the basic concepts of synthetic biology to the students. Also, to get students interested, we invited them to our lab, showed them our equipment and also demonstrated to them some basic laboratory techniques. Their enthusiasm was truly infectious.
Minterlab - a collaboration project with SoundBio Lab, USA, was our way of educating young minds from elementary schools around the corner about synthetic biology and genetic engineering. Minterlab, short for Mini-Interlab, was held as a 3-day camp session in July for the sixth and seventh graders of Kendriya Vidyalaya, IISc. The event revolved around a flexible curriculum and a final experiment, the details of which were sent to us by SoundBio Lab. We at iGEM IISc added our own touch to it, to make the syllabus a better fit to the particular crowd of curious minds around us. The session involved several practical demonstrations and hands-on experience with various lab techniques. Through Minterlab, the students were given an immersing experience into the field of synthetic biology, a unique opportunity that we believe augmented their interest and hopefully, sparked ideas for the future. We also collaborated with the SoundBio iGEM team to host Minterlab wherein we organised a 5 day summer camp. The original Minterlab curriculum was modified to suit the Indian audience. We invited middle school students to our lab and made them do some hands-on activities that helped them understand concepts of synthetic biology better. This was an enthralling experience for both us and the students.
Stop-gap animation
As mentioned on our Human Practices page, our team created and shared a short animated video on the dangers of untreated sewage and the usage of MFCs. To make our video more appealing to the general audience, we narrated it as a story and shared the following text with it:
“Oh well, this culture isn’t useful anymore. Let me just wash it off” and thus began the journey of our deadly bacteria, Sally, into the big, wide world. Only to be interrupted by the thought of a thoughtful person who decided to make use of it before disposal to generate electricity using a Microbial Fuel Cells
Sally is a species of bacteria Salmonella typhi that is known to cause typhoid in human beings. Careless handling of such samples can lead to widespread diseases. A remedy to this, among a hoard of others including not being careless and treating bacterial samples appropriately before disposal, are Microbial Fuel Cells. MFCs are basically fuel cells with living biocatalysts to catalyse redox reactions instead of chemical ones. These cells serve multiple purposes: one is the treatment of organic sewage, laboratory or industrial samples. Another is the production of energy as electricity which can be re-used to self-power the MFC, making the entire process sustainable.
Reaching out through pamphlets
We realized another effective way to spread awareness would be to actually meet people to discuss the rising problem of poor water quality in Bangalore's lakes. So we went to Sankey Tank, a popular park in Bangalore that also happens to be situated around a lake. We distributed pamphlets in both English and Kannada to the people visiting the park. We met many who had realized Bangalore's worsening condition of lakes and so the pamphlets opened up an opportunity to discuss these issues and to expand upon the solution we proposed. We found several people who were keen to learn more about our project and the face-to-face interaction let us describe the reasons for the problem and the need for efficient water treatment systems in greater detail. The pamphlets we handed out are attached below:
