Team:TU Dresden/Public Engagement
Beaming BioBricks from Space...
Public Engagement - AN OVERVIEW
Public Engagement - AN OVERVIEW
While developing our project, we realized that we also had to include the transgender community as one of our main stakeholders to act in a responsible manner, since our proof-of-concept experiment involves testing for the SRY gene.
Scientists could use our test in several manners, from a clone checking tool when working in the lab to mutant or knock-out screening in animal models or GMO-plants.
Doctors would extremely benefit from a DNA-testing-kit, since it can be used as a preliminary, easy and fast disease test when examining the individual risk and disease history of each patient.
Seniors are more prone to be affected by diseases and are therefore the main beneficiaries of our DipGene project.
The transgender community started to be involved in our project when we decided to test for the SRY-gene as a proof-of-concept experiment of our DipGene tool.
We decided to focus our Education & Public Engagement activities on the older population, since they are one of our main stakeholders of our project, and we noticed that there not so much effort is put from the society to explain science to them. However, we wanted to expand our knowledge to a broader audience as well, trying to involve as many different groups as possible. We targeted future iGEM teams by creating a series of videos on “HOW TO iGEM", but also friends, colleagues, kids, the scientific and non-scientific community in Dresden, and worlwide, by holding several presentations, publishing articles in print and online media, and others.
Our main focus:
The Older Population
After bringing our project closer to the major beneficiaries during our Integrated Human Practices, namely the transgender community and the seniors, we decided to focus our Public Engagement activities on the older population, since we realized how difficult it can be for them to follow modern science and technological advances and how eager they are to learn and understand. First of all, in order to ensure a responsible and non-offensive way of referring to them we did some research and decided to stay with the following article, claiming that the most appropriate ways are: older population and seniors. [4] That is why we will refer to them in one of the aforementioned manners.
As already highlighted before, the population over age 65 increased in the last 10 years, and will keep rising for at least 20 years more due to the improved life conditions, as well as the post-world war II baby boom. [2] The WHO already stated that the world’s population over 60 in 2050 is expected to even double the values of 2015 [3]. This implies having a long-living but rather sick population, since aging is related to the development of different diseases as well as impairments. [4] That is why we decided to focus our Public Engagement on those who are going to be able to benefit mostly from our project.
We also invite you to check out our Integrated Human Practices!
Scientific advances have been progressing extremely fast in the last years, but it is quite sad to think that a big part of the population can barely follow what is being discovered. Our first step was therefore to find out their opinion about modern science, try to understand their position and think about what society could do to improve this situation.
Our next approach was to make our project available for the older population. For that, we decided to design a video about our project in a very simple manner, making it easy to follow and understandable for everyone. The key aspect that we understood by getting in touch with them, was that one of their biggest barriers to access science is the language. Since the most part of our population of interest does not understand English, we recorded these videos in some of the most spoken languages in the world: Spanish, Russian, German, Tamil, Persian, Catalan, French, Arabic as well as English, of course.
Check them out!
Nevertheless, we thought that the best way of bringing our project, iGEM, and science closer to them, was to visit them personally. Hence, we organized two visits: the first one was to the so called “Begegnungs- und Beratungszentrum Johannstädter Kulturtreff”, which is a centre that brings the older population together every Tuesday to eat cake and drink coffee while they listen to presentations about different topics. Typically, they also organize guided tours with them. The second was in the “Seniorenakademie”, which is a forum that organizes a whole program of presentations for the older population on a weekly basis to allow them to take part in scientific advances. Their main focus is to bring together young scientists and the seniors.
Our experience at the Johannstädter Kulturtreff:
On September the 10th we went to their meeting point and got to know them. We told them about iGEM, about our project and about the importance of diagnosing genetic diseases in advance. We were especially interested in knowing if they would be willing to test our kit in the way we have designed it, since they were our main stakeholders. As already explained in IHP part, most of them were extremely interested in getting tested and were even sad when they discovered that we are still working on the project.
A crucial aspect that we found out during this meeting was the importance they give to data-protection. Some of them would not be willing to donate DNA samples knowing that people could get any type of information from them and therefore, we integrated a “DNase-spray” as a final step in our project. (Read Integrated Human Practices to know more about that) .
Furthermore, we were interested in how the seniors prefer to donate DNA, and once again they also voted for buccal swab donation rather than hair, blood or urine*.
They were so interested in our project and getting to know more about science that we offered them the opportunity to come to the lab (keep reading!).
* This survey was performed orally, just out of curiosity, since our buccal swap DNA extraction was already established at that point by the survey made during the “Cellular Machines” lecture.
Our presentation to the Seniorenakademie:
On the 16th of October we gave a presentation as a part of the Seniorenakademie program to allow a new group of seniors to understand our project and get a feeling on how science works and how many new things can be done. In total we had 90 min to give the presentation, answer questions and just chat with the ones who were interested. Their responses and interest in our project and effort to follow were impressive. During and after the presentation we got caught in long and very interesting discussions with them. Once again, the topic of genomic data protection arose and even those that were quite during the presentation joined then the discussion. This reassured us that our idea of providing our kit with a DNase-spray is of great importance.
We wanted to go even further and offered the seniors the possibility to experience a normal day for scientists working in the laboratory. Therefore, we invited the Begegnugszentrum e.V. to come to the lab where we have been working on our iGEM experiments during all these months at the Biotec, Dresden on the 14th of October.
Before entering the lab, we gave them safety instructions, provided them with lab coats, gloves as well as safety glasses. We showed them around, explained them for what all the different materials and devices can be used, and performed an easy experiment with them.
The experiment that we carried out with them was the following: we took epithelial cells from our buccal mucosa with cotton swabs, plated them on a coverslip and stained them with methylene blue. We then observed our epithelial cells under the microscope. We printed everyone’s cell images a few days later and met the seniors again in the “Begegnugszentrum Johann” to give them their pictures.
We explained them what cells and their main components are and highlighted the function of the nucleus and DNA in each cell. We furthermore talked about bacteria and made the older population aware of the difference in size between human cells and bacteria.
By doing so, we showed them that science and in general, research, is not a hidden or complicated world. It can be understood by everyone if people take their time to explain it properly and in an easy manner.
They liked our tour so much that the coordinators of the “Begegnugszentrum Johann e.V” have asked us whether we could repeat these activities with another group of seniors, and indeed we agreed on offering another tour in January.
Adivicing future iGEM teams:
After realizing during the last months how important it is to get good advice on the right moment and adapt your project according to that, we came to the conclusion that we would have really appreciated a quick aid at the very beginning, especially in the first couple of months in which we were discovering all what iGEM is about.
Therefore, we decided to prepare a series of videos on HOW TO iGEM with the aim of mentoring future teams. These videos are meant to be for all the future iGEMers, especially for those taking part in iGEM for the first time. We hope that future iGEM teams will watch these videos at the beginning of their journey and will benefit from them in different aspects, integrating our advices in their projects. We started a collaboration campaign in which many teams contacted us, told us about the problems that they encountered, and this way gave us the topics for our videos. Some teams even created scripts together with us.
#5 BioBricks
#6 Distribution Kit
#7 Why to iGEM
Outreach: Science
available for everyone
Although our main target population to share our project and science with were the people of advanced age, it was also important for us to include the rest, since we think science should be available for everyone. Therefore, we performed different activities to catch the attention and interest of a broad audience.
To catch the attention of the kids, our team took part in the Long Night of Science of the Center for Mollecular and Cellular Bioengineering (CMCB) in Dresden, to which more than 2100 people attended. We had two stands and three posters, one to explain what iGEM is and two for the projects that we have been working on. We were also offering take-away brochures for those who wanted to read more carefully about iGEM and our projects.
During the entire afternoon and evening we were carrying out two different but very exciting experiments in order to facilitate the understanding of our projects. For our Sweet Spirulina project, we prepared home-made lemonade and asked people to try it before and after having eaten a miraculin tablet. Indeed, we were able to demonstrate that it is possible to obtain “sweet” lemonade without adding sugars and of course, everyone was extremely fascinated!
In order to bring our second project (DipGene) closer to the audience, we showed them how easy it can be to extract DNA. For that, we used an extremely compact protocol to extract DNA from strawberries, which only took us a few minutes. It was an extraordinary experience that the kids loved!
To reach the science community in Dresden, we published articles in two different Newsletters, namely in the university journal of the Technical University Dresden and in the monthly journal of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering (short, CMCB). In these articles we wrote about the competition itself, about our team and supervisors, and provided a brief description of our projects. By doing so, a lot of people started following our work and supporting us, especially via social networks.
Furthermore, to not only reach the science community in Dresden, but also the worlwide scientific audience, we published two articles in the Europhins blog, one about our final project, Dipgene, and one about the second project which we have been working on for several months: Sweet Spirulina .
Since two of our team members are Spanish, it was important for us to also share our project with spanish citizens. For that, we got in contact with a regional TV channel (“A punt”) that agreed on publishing an article about us in their online web-page:
To reach our friends and colleagues from university, we got the extraordinary opportunity to introduce the iGEM competition and to present our project to a broad audience during an university seminar of the course “Cellular Machines”, taught by Prof. Dr. Stefan Diez for students of different master’s programs, such as Nanobiophysics, Molecular Bioengineering, Physics and others.
The entire CMCB was invited to attend to our presentation, in which we explained what iGEM is, what tasks you need to fullfill to participate in the competition, and of course, what our projects consist of, and our experimental results until that point in time. As mentioned in the IHP part, we carried out a survey during our presentation in order to ask for their audience’s opinion regarding the DNA extraction to integrate this in our project. We were interested in knowing how they would prefer to “donate” DNA if they had to: either via buccal swab, hair, blood, or urine. An 80 % of the participants voted for buccal swab and that is why we decided to work with this DNA extraction method as a part of our project. Click below to download the written consent of the students that took part in this survey.
To reach a broad audience composed by friends, colleagues, scientists but also non-scientific adults, our team took part in two different Science Slams. The first one was during the Long Night of Science of our center (CMCB), in which Nikitha, Paula and Arnau from our team gave three different (but very funny) presentations, that were closely related to our iGEM project (e.g. about Cas9 and GMOs) in order to facilitate its understanding.
Arnau also participated in the Science Fiction Slam one week later, in which he talked about GMOs in relation to to the famous movie “Jurassic Park”. He even won the Science Slam!
Our iGEM team had the chance to take part in to two iGEM meet-ups during the preparation months. They were extremely helpful in several different aspects and have allowed us to improve the team efficiency in the remaining months.
International Meeting in Den Haag
The first meeting which we attended took place from the 13th until the 14th of May in Den Haag, the Netherlands. There, five of us represented our team and our two projects. The meeting really helped us to realize how important the wiki is and thus, made us aware of the fact that we had to start working very hard on it directly after arriving in Dresden. Apart from that, the meet-up in den Haag allowed us to get in contact with other iGEM teams, facilitating the communication which resulted in several very fascinating collaborations, as the ones with Eindhoven and Leiden.
German Meeting in Düsseldorf
The meeting in Düsseldorf from the 5th until the 7th of Juli was a very fruitful experience that allowed us to establish many of the collaborations that we have been counting with during these months, as for example with the teams from Berlin, Stuttgart, Tübingen and Düsseldorf.
Social Media
To share our project ideas as well as advances of synthetic biology, especially with those who are not actively involved in the scientific community, we recognized the need to extend our reach by using different social media platforms.
Since more than 1 billion people monthly use Instagram, we took this benefit to spread the information about our project as well as iGEM over the world to attract more and more people to be into science solving the global problems together with us! Moreover, we were always informed about other iGEM projects and were actively communicating with many teams via this platform! Roughly 80% of all our collaborations were initiated thanks to our Instagram account.
We primarily used Twitter to share our news within scientific environment. It is also important to keep updated people working on the same goals! For example, we were followed and often retweeted by Center for Regenerative Therapies (CRTD), Center for Molecular Bioengineering (B CUBE), Biotechnology center (BIOTEC), and the Center of Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD).
References
[1] Falconer, M., & O'Neill, D. (2007). Out with “the old,” elderly, and aged. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 334(7588), 316.
[2] Jaul, E., & Barron, J. (2017). Age-Related Diseases and Clinical and Public Health Implications for the 85 Years Old and Over Population. Frontiers in public health, 5, 335.
[3] WHO: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-health, Date of access: 13.10.2019
[4] Franceschi, C., Garagnani, P., Morsiani, C., Conte, M., Santoro, A., Grignolio, A., Monti, D., Capri, M., Salvioli, S. (2018). The Continuum of Aging and Age-Related Diseases: Common Mechanisms but Different Rates. Frontiers in medicine, 5, 61
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