Team:Sorbonne U Paris/Public Engagement

FÊTE DE LA SCIENCE


Sorbonne University brings together actors from the scientific, cultural and educational community as well as non-profit organizations at the heart of the Pierre and Marie Curie Science Campus to celebrate the Science Festival from 11 to 13 October 2019. The Science Village aims to promote the scientific issues of its community around the challenges of tomorrow. The festival has brought together more than 10,000 visitors including primary schools, middle schools, high-school and college students, but also families and curious visitors. At the occasion of this event, we held a booth in which 5 activities adapted to all ages were proposed : an escape game, the manufacture of a lava lamp and the notion of miscibility, the extraction of strawberry DNA, a set of products "Palm or Not Palm ?" as well as the observation of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii under an optical microscope. Finally, we also exhibited our comic book and our free video game.


PRACTICAL CLASS


One of the goals of our public and educational engagement process is to organize and carry out Practical Workshopsfor a class of 32 High School students specializing in science at the Lycée Maurice Genevoix in Montrouge. With the agreement of the teacher, Yasmine Bellagha, our work aimed to show them the influence of the environment on the variability of genetic information in a educational and playful way. For this purpose, the students exposed yeasts to UV C at different time intervals to induce random mutagenesis in the adenine biosynthesis pathway. The practice and analysis of the results obtained allowed them to discover in a more interactive way the link between genotype and phenotype. Moreover, this approach was an opportunity for our team to present the different profiles of the team members and their professional projects after a scientific high school diploma, but above all to present our project, iGEM and the importance of synthetic biology to solve current problems of world-wide impact.

COMIC STRIP


Throughout our project, we wanted to diversify our communication media and use different tools to reach a wide audience and allow people of all ages and professions to have access to Science. The creation of a comic strip, for example, perfectly illustrates our desire to popularize science by targeting in this case a particularly young audience, but also the not-so-young ones. To this end, we have developed a scenario around our project by highlighting the important environmental issues related to palm oil production and by explaining and simplifying the  scientific part of our project. The illustrations were made by Marlène Mezache, a visual art student. "The journey of Loran: From the jungle to the lab" is the story of a group of inspired Parisian students united by their common passion for science. After realizing the problems of deforestation caused by the cultivation of oil palm trees, they will be embarked on an incredible adventure and conduct experiments in the backdrop of the Indonesian forest, helped by Professor Hugues Depalm and their new friend Loran the orangutan!


DOWNLOAD OUR COMIC STRIP

VIDEO GAME


In this same desire to diversify our communication supports, we have chosen to propose a small video game in order to popularize our project in a playful way. In this game, "THE BIOILOGICAL ADVENTURE", Loran the orangutan travels in multiple sceneries and must recover the tools necessary for our experiments in order to save his family and his forest. Through this video game, our objective was to raise awareness among the general public, especially the youngest, about the palm oil production but also about the daily products that contain it. We called on Marlène Mezache for the graphics and Rémy Choffardet for the game coding.



WINDOWS VERSION MAC VERSION


JE SCIENCE DONC J'ÉCRIS


We have undertaken a collaboration with the university journal for the popularization of science named “Je Science donc J’Ecris” (“I Science, therefore I write”). Indeed, every month, we were in charge of writing articles to spread scientific knowledge and innovation in the field of biology. More specifically, we have written articles in concert with our project (synthetic biology, ethics, palm oil and microalgae) in order to raise awareness of the consequences of palm oil production and inform people about the huge potential of synthetic biology. Some of the articles have been published on the popular science website Amphisciences.



CONFERENCES


In order to popularize science and allow the general public to better understand the world of synthetic biology and its challenges, one of the actions of our team was to organize seminars about synthetic biology on the Pierre et Marie Curie (Jussieu) campus. For this purpose, we have invited Dr. Stéphane Lemaire, Director of Research at the CNRS, to speak  about the principles of synthetic biology at a first conference in June. This event was an opportunity for us to address this field in a more accessible way and to talk about our project. Our second conference organized in October was hosted by Dr. Pierre-Luc Bardet, Associate Professor of Cellular Biology and Bioethics. We have chosen to approach synthetic biology through the prism of ethics, in the form of an interactive debate preceded by an introduction on the subject. The idea was to be able to set up a dialogue and exchange questions and ideas on the ethical issues raised by synthetic biology. These two conferences were relayed on all our social networks.




PRESENTING IGEM TO NEW MASTER STUDENTS


At the beginning (by September 2019), we were able to present our project as well as iGEM - the international competition - to the new students of the Master of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Sorbonne University. 
On that occasion, we had the opportunity to raise awareness about synthetic biology and the solutions it can provide for contemporary issues (environmental, societal and medical). 
At the end, we discussed the various challenges we had to face for this competition: the scientific project part, the scientific vulgarization and its dissemination along with synthetic biology which is a new concept among public.