Team:JNFLS/Public Engagement
Education and Public Engagement:
In this part, we prepared 3 topics: introduction lecture, ethical issue study and discussion, including notorious gene-edited baby taken place in China last year, and comics drawn by our team member, to demonstrate our work for Education and Public Engagement.
1.Introduction our project and Synthetic Biology to different population by lecture.
We gave different lectures about our project and synthetic Biology, as well as ethical issue of Synthetic Biology individually. Taking the permission from the museum, we prepared different speech content to different population.
After all of those events above were completed, we wrote a newsletter about our iGem project and what we did so far, including the whole design, Human Practices, the introduction of formaldehyde. Then we published it to the official account of our school on the most popular chatting app called WeChat to demonstrate our work to more people.
Our team members also went to the other three high school to propagate. We introduced what Synthetic Biology is and discussed ethical issue in it with middle school students. Considering students in middle school just start to learn Biology, we only taught basic section to them.
We took the related difficult part to our high school’s Biochemistry Club. High school students hold more knowledge asset to understand what we said. Recently, the project teaching will be prepared for club recruitment.
2.Study and discussion of ethical issue
During the session of 6th CCiC, we attended a lecture given by a professor who talked about the safety and moral issues involving gene editing, and we think that we got a deeper understanding about the responsibilities of scientists, especially that moral responsibility.
As high school students, we feel the need of a moral compass in our mind, which is crucial for us if we become scientists some day, so this is also a main focus of our Human Practices. By attending one meeting about the biosafty and moral issues involving molecule biology, especially gene editing, we think that we got a bit clue about why moral issues are important for this field of research and experiments. During that session, we heard about the story happened in the fall of the last year, which was about the gene-edited baby. The main thing we learnt was that, as the off-targeting rate of the technique was high, it might lead to other unwanted potential problems to the baby. What makes it worse is that this change or damage is hereditary and it would be passed to the offspring of this baby. All the potential damage would be irriversible, so we need to make sure that this kind of technology would never be miss-used, at least in our hands. After returning back to school, we also made a simple explaination about the CRISPR technique to the fresh year students who were also interested in biochemistry. Then, we talked about the moral issues and the possible consequences of miss-use of it, most of which were leanrt from CCiC in Shenzhen.
3.Comics publicity
Some of our team members drew several comic scripts to describe how our project works to solve the problem of formaldehyde. We have to admit that, without professional artist help, we failed to make the final graph looked more appealing, but we are still proud of it. We published our art work to a very popular comic app in China called KK Comics, which is also accessible both from the Internet and WeChat at the same time.
Our main aim was to explain clearly what we actually did to the public and we thought that, with the demonstration of pictures, readers would find it easier to understand, even to those who bears little knowledge towards biochemistry.
Click me to see the PDF file.