Team:Nanjing NFLS/Public Engagement
Based on the public survey, we set three goals for our public engagement and educational activities.
1. To change stereotypes and misguided beliefs towards cancer
2. To promote synthetic biology
3. To promote Bioethics and its implication
Community/Neighborhood
Poster in community
According to our survey, the elderly is a high-risk group of cancer and hold various misguided beliefs towards cancer. i.e. cancer is infectious to cancer is caused by virus. We hope to solve this problem by distributing leaflets in the community. We distributed leaflets at 6 communities in Nanjing. The leaflets introduce the basic fact of cancer, cause of cancer, and prevention of cancer.
At the same time, we posted posters on the community bulletin board. Therefore, people who come in and out of gate every day can read it. In this poster, we introduced our project, CITHA, and synthetic biology. Many elderly people said they had a more scientific understanding of cancer.
Through a good example of synthetic biology benefiting modern medicine, we have successfully combined synthetic biology with cancer, a topic that people are more familiar with, and promoted this new interdisciplinary field of biology.
WeChat Official Account
WeChat is an extremely popular social media in China. Our Wechat official account, iGEMNFLS published information on project updates, our public engagements, and science articles centered on synthetic biology and cancer.
Our WeChat account helped us collect questionnaire answer sheets and paintings for the competition. The reading volume of our articles has been increasing and eventually broke a thousand. Moreover, hundreds of people subscribe to us, some people also leaving a message to us, which shows that our public education through social media was effective.
“Soooooo interesting and vivid! It’s much more easier to understand cancer through comics.:)”
—— user name: “A cup of tea”
High School
We reach out to high school students via Synthetic Biology Club activities. We organized various activities combining synthetic biology with other subjects. To widen our impact in school, we hosted 4 series of activities focusing on synthetic biology related areas via Synthetic Biology Club,introducing synthetic biology, inspiring bioethics/social issues discussions and Enlarging the iGEM community.
Debate
With rapid development of technology have come various ethical concerns and social backlash. To further inspire students to consider the societal side of future bio-tech and to widen the impact, we organized a 4-round debate tournament centered on genetic engineering in cooperation with NFLS English Debate Society.
Here are the motions:
1. This House Prefers a world in which all children are conceived with DNA from a global genetic database.”
2. This House Believes that if Josef Mengele had Discovered a Cure for Cancer, it'd be morally Acceptable to use it
3. This House Would allow major medical charities and providers (i.e. Cancer Research, Alzheimer Society of Ireland) to sue media outlets and organizations who share incomplete, incorrect, or misleading medical information.
4. This House Believes That public health services should expand access to gene editing technologies.
Art
We organized a drawing competition for ninth-graders and tenth-graders, aiming to use art to depict the charisma of genetic world. The theme is “Double Helix”, requiring participators to include DNA double helix structure in painting. We selected some entries on our WeChat official account and Instagram.
We hope more schoolmates will join our iGEM team and appeal to future iGEMers who just started to get familiar with DNA Double Helix.
Seminar
We hosted four seminars on the theme of ‘Biopunk’, which attracted students from Sophomore and Junior to brainstorm on synthetic biology.Each seminar includes two parts, one introducing synthetic biology, the other on synthetic biology’s implication.
We also collaborated with CPU_China to organize a lecture on synthetic biology and iGEM at our school. They introduced the concept of synthetic biology and what to do for participating in iGEM.
Here are the themes:
Lectures:
1) Synthetic biology and medical health;
2) Synthetic biology and energy;
3) The economic and social benefits of synthetic biology;
Salon: Social problems that synthetic biology can bring: transforming people?
This activity explored synthetic biology through an interdisciplinary approach,connected science and life closely and enabled high school students to think deeply about cutting-edge technology in a relaxed and free form, which brought synthetic biology closer to high school students.
Baking
To make lab life more colorful, we participated in “Cooking with iGEM” competition organized by Saint Joseph. We, together with baking lovers, made a lot of cookies with iGEM logo and team logo. It’s of great fun!
Primary School
Biology is closely related to people’s daily life. In Chinese primary schools, students can learn biology in science class. However, science is not treated as the main subject. Due to outdated textbook content, students failed to update knowledge of biology. Therefore, we decided to initiate a series of lectures in Langya Rd. Primary School and Dingjiaqiao Primary School to help change status quo. In total, we gave 9 lectures to 137 six-graders.
We divided the course into three phases: biology ABC, synthetic biology & bioethics and cancer.
In the 1st phase, we intended to help them build the basic concept of biology. We initiated discussions on the definition of life and witnessed diverse perspectives. By utilizing familiar examples, we introduced basic functions of organelles and structures. We also made models of plant and animal cells with plastic clay to help them understand.
The 2nd phase is the most challenging one: introducing synthetic biology and bioethics. Before class, we gave pupils assignments: read 4 recommended popular science articles. During class, we started from cells (what they have already learned in science class and our last lecture) and then moved forward to DNA and gene. Utilizing LEGO bricks, we carried on our discussion to higher level in a more vivid way. We guided students to think about potential applications of synthetic biology. When they mentioned artificial life, we shifted our topic to bioethics. We told the story of Craig Venter and Synthia and gene-edited babies. We hope this pursuit for ethics will persist in their future academic and career path.
In the 3rd phase, we talked about cancer. We introduced the nature of cancer, its impact on human society, and its prevention and therapies. We explained the inspiration and methodology of our project. A student’s parents happened to be cancer drug developers; they appreciated our initiatives and efforts, after learning about our project.
We distributed feedback questionnaires to students after each lecture to improve our teaching methods. We received a 100% satisfactory rate. Before, nearly half of them didn't know what cancer is and almost all of them didn't know synthetic biology. However, after this series of lectures, they are happy to learn something not in textbooks. Here are some words extracted from the feedback questionnaires.
We gifted them Scientific American (Chinese version) to encourage them to explore the world of science.
“The impressive lecture and broadens students' science vision. The vivid language successfully attracts students' attention and creates an active atmosphere. Overall, it's excellent!”
—— Fangxia Jiang, head teacher of Class 3 Grade 6 at Dingjiaqiao Primary School
“Human is not the god ,so we shouldn’t do something which is too dangerous. Wish we all can improve a lot.”
——Yanning Wan, a six-grader