Team:USP-Brazil/Public Engagement
Welcome to Education and Public Engagement
Science communication and media participation
16 years has already passed, since the first iGEM competition. Over the years iGEM competition has become the world's largest synthetic biology competition, alongside that synthetic biology has become a well known area however we still have a long path in order to make it world-wide known.
In order to make synthetic biology and iGEM competition more well known we contacted 3 groups specialized in science communication. Profissão Biotech was the first media contacted. They are known for having interest in disseminating scientific topics related to biotechnology, having an audience composed mostly by an public interested in the sciences of life. With them, we elaborated an article, were we talked about some synthetic biology concepts, the iGEM competition and about the Brazil tradition of participation in the competition. We also contacted “Ciência USP”, the main entity of our University, USP, responsible for dissemination of university research to society. With them, an podcast was elaborated. In this podcast we also collaborated with our PI, Gisele Monteiro, Rafael Silva Rocha, synthetic biologist expert in Brazil and some brazilian iGEM teams (USP-São Carlos, UFRGS-Brazil and Amazonas-Brazil). After participating in both activities, the team started to look for ways to improve their science communication.
Interview with Prof Lygia Pereira
On August 12 we did an interview with USP Professor Lygia da Veiga Pereira, to learn how to improve ours science communication.
Professor Lygia is a widely acknowledge researcher in Brazil, for her expertise in the study of stem cells, having been the first to establish an brazilian lineage of stem cells. Not only is she a renowned researcher, but Lygia also has an important participation in brazilian science communication, through televisions programs, writing articles for journals, giving lectures and writing books such as “Promises and reality of stem cells” and “Cloning: The Dolly sheep and stem cells”.
In our interview, we focused in discussing the importance of scientific communication and about the methods to improve it. According to Professor Lygia:
“The role of science communication is to include the entire population in decisions about what to do with science and its new discoveries.” (Lygia Pereira)
In that context, the role of the scientist consist of transmitting that scientific knowledge without any ideology, without any ideological bias and with scientific rigor to society. Having the knowledge the society will understand better their own country law, and will be able to decide , based on their beliefs and cultures, what public policies they want to create in their country. Because of that, for Lygia:
“The requirement for understanding her books is to have interest in the topic” (Lygia Pereira)
One point is that researchers have an enormous difficulty of transmitting their knowledge to society because of the technical terms that they are accustomed of hearing, to deal with this problem, Lygia recommended to always try to put yourself in the place of the audience, try to find topics that will dispert the audience curiosity and it is recommended to always try to use figures and analogies to transmit scientific concepts.
We also asked about how to communicate when the market is the audience, in response to that Lygia said:
“The important thing is that you can convey very clearly what is being developed and its applications. You have to be very clear about the final product. Present what problem you want to solve with the customer. Always trying to associate the solutions with situations in the daily life ” (Lygia Pereira)
Biocientista mirim Workshop
For all the activities we proposed ourselves to make at NGOs and schools, we wanted to bring an experience that would really engage the community to learn about what whether we were talking. For that, we looked for a group from our university called Biocientista MIrim, to help us developing some of our workshops.
Biocientista Mirim is an extension group formed by students from the Biomedical Science Instituite (ICB-USP) an led by PhD Renata Furlan. Its aim is to interact with educators and kids from public schools and teach them about some subjects that are not taught at schools, like “What is it like to be a scientist” and “How does vaccine work?”.
We ‘ve already worked with them in early years for some of our human practices activities. This year, we’ve joined them to develop some of the workshops that we were planning to make at schools. During a day, we’ve developed two of these workshops.
The main one is called “Dirty Hands” and it was probably that hardest one to create. The focus of this activity was to show the biological relevance of always keeping our hands clear. The main activity of this workshop was making all the kids handle a “contaminated” object without them knowing it. In fact, this contaminated object was covered with a really thin dust that can’t be seen or felt when you touch it. This way, all the kids the gets their hands “contaminated” by this powder without realizing.
Although invisible, this powder is fluorescent when it’s exposed to black light. Some other activities are done during the workshop and by the end of it everyone is called to take a look at their hands in a home made chamber equipped with black light. After that they are shown the best way to clean their hands and avoid holding any kind of dirt in their hands.
Workshop with educators at ONG Projeto Arrastão
As we had the "Biocientista Mirim" workshop preparation and tips from professor Lygia da Veiga Pereira on how to spread science, we thought on which topic from biotechnology could be interesting to apply as a game with children and also what could we do to improve education on this subject at our region. So, we contacted the non profit organization Projeto Arrastão, located in Campo Limpo, São Paulo. Campo Limpo is a neighborhood known for having a high quantity of brazilian favelas ( 237), and for having a high violence index (as seen in Table 1). 27% of the houses at Campo Limpo doesn't have accesses to sewerage system and this is alarming when we consider public health and increases the number of occurrence of infectious diseases. At the same period that we were contacted the ONG, Sao Paulo had an outbreak of measles. There were 3591 cases of measles confirmed in our city. Thinking about that context, we concluded that an important subject to talk about would be vaccines and transgenic food. Therefore, we prepare a short workshop for the educators of Projeto Arrastao, on why transgenic food and vaccines are important and safe. The educators are the teachers that guide and prepare activities made for the children. Currently there are 300 childrens with the age range by 6-14 years old.
The workshop lasted 3 hours. We prepared a powerpoint and some practical activities inspiration. The lesson began discussing about what is biotech and when it was born. Then we talked about DNA structure, modified genetic organisms (transgenic food and what products are produced in Brazil) and vaccines. The last moment was about didactic activities and ideas of games that could be applied with children and make them learn at the same time.
We discussed doubts that they had about whether transgenic food is safe or not. There were interesting discussion about fake news and the reasons for the existence of non scientific movement. At the end, we gave some questions about the workshop that we made, in order for us to receive feedback about our workshop. Overall we received a very good feedback, specially based on the discussion. Now we know exactly how to improve our initiative and how much we impact the educators.
Workshop with children from ONG “GEMA”
Based on what we learn with professor Lygia da Veiga and in the Biocientista Mirim group we searched GEMA (Group of Hope for Less Abandonment) in order to apply a workshop and an investigative activity for the children. GEMA is a non-governmental organization created in August 2000 by a group of women. It attends children in need by the afternoon. GEMA Promotes actions in the areas of Health, Environment, Income Generation, Culture, Arts and Socio-Educational, capable of triggering the personal and social development of children and their families. In 3 September we talked with 6 children from the age 8-10 years old.
The lesson
First we had a talk on what they thought a microorganism was (There were some pretty funny answers). Then, we question them if all the microorganisms were pathogenic and where they lived. (They answered that mainly in our hands and that microorganisms causes diseases such as diarrhea) The lesson continue with the question what a scientist do? And one of the children answered: A detective's job! Then, the assay was to draw what they think a bacteria look like, some of them draw it if seen in a plate.
The activity
We design an activity to understand the importance of washing hands with both water and soap. And how that could imply in our health. The children were divided in 3 groups, being: no washed hands; hands washed with only water and hands washed with water and soap. After that, they touched the fingertip on a LB-agar plate and sealed them. They also discuss the expected result based on the lesson before. In the end of the activity we showed them real images of bacteria (E. coli, Agrobacterium and so on). After a month growing we discuss the result with them, analysed what could have go wrong, what we did right and how water and soap is really efficient to remove the most part of the bacteria and fungi, but it depends on the type of soap and also there are some microorganism that remain from our microbiota.
Meeting with LATAM iGEM Ambassador
Since 2009 Brazil participates on iGEM, although in 2010 there weren't any teams participating (Graphic 1). Another important consideration is that since 2009 there haven't being formed any High School teams in Brazil. Interestingly, Latin America, together with Africa, is one of the sub-represented regions, considering that among 377 teams registered they represent, respectively, 5% (18 teams in total) and 1% (5 teams in total) of the competition in 2019 (Graphic 2). This can have many different explanations but, mainly, is due to lack of budget and investment in science. For example, this year in Brazil we experienced a contingency of research scholarships which have also impacted on graduation students willing to continue on an academic career. With that context in mind, we met the iGEM LATAM ambassador, Manuel Gimènez, and talked a lot during a meeting at our university when he was around. One of the topics that we talked about were budgets and ways that we can improve our science and our representation at iGEM. Also, the importance of collaboration with other teams and our main concerns for this year competition. He made a comparison between making research in USA and in Latin America, the prons and cons. After that, we presented our idea of building the first high school brazilian team, which we did. Manu said that he could put us in touch with a teacher that have this experience from Peru. Another important idea that we had during this meeting was how we were going to built the next year USP-Brazil team. We presented the problems that we encounter regarding team formation, such as: lack of divulgation at our University; lack of bureaucratic organization and further. Manu said that organizing teams have to vary together with the local context. He also enjoyed some of our ideas of how we pretend to improve these problems, we thought on improve the divulgation of iGEM by making an event of SynBio at USP after we return of Giant Jamboree and also by making a selective process in order to make more students interested.
Assembly of the first Brazil High School iGEM Team
After our meeting with igem LATAM embassador, we started acting towards our goal on builting the first High School team, specially because we wanted to improve the willingness to do science in young people and also because there aren't any Brazilian High School teams yet (Figure 1). Thinking of this, we talked with the professor responsible for “Biocientista Mirim” group, Renata Furlan, because she said that last year there was a professor from a private basic school at SP that contact her with the interest of mounting a team to participate at iGEM. But Renata didn't do anything about it because she didn't know how iGEM works. So, we got the contact from Renata and then we start working on it! First of all, we sent an email to Lucianne, a distinguished professor from Bandeirantes school. Lucianne is Graduated in Veterinary Medicine from the Federal University of Paraná, Specializated in Microbiology from PUC-PR and in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology Applied to Agribusiness from the Federal University of Paraná - Palotina. She has a Master's degree in Veterinary Sciences from UFPR and PhD from USP (ICB - Microbiology) with a Sandwich Ph.D. held at ANSES (Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire de lAutation, de l 'Environnement et du Travail) - France, Lyon. Nowadays she is a STEAM Professor (Science, Techn, Eng, Arts and Math) and Team Leader in the Elective Biotechnology Disciplines (Microorganisms and Molecular Biology) and BandForense, Bandeirantes College. COLÉGIO BANDEIRANTES is a co-ed, private, and non-religiously affiliated institution. It is solely funded by tuition, paid in installments throughout the year.The school has the highest entrance rate to the top Brazilian universities among secondary schools in São Paulo and ranks among the top schools in the national exam ENEM - Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (National Exam for High School students), administered once a year by the Ministry of Education every November. In our first meeting with professor Lucianne and the Science Coordinator, Ricardo Almeida (02/09), we present why iGEM is important and which are the benefits that high school students have when participating at the competition. We talked about the multiple facets of iGEM, the Human Practices actions and Entrepreneurship actions that iGEEMers develop during the year. These factors interested a lot them because Bandeirantes invest in the multiple activities outside the normal disciplines. So, we built a plan to show to the students what is Synthetic Biology, what is iGEM and why participate. We decided to talk to the Bandeirantes science Club and the 3 classes of Biotechnology.
Workshop for the science club
On 5 September we went again at Bandeirantes college to talk with the students of the Science Club (Figures 2-3). We had one hour in total, so we begun with the panoramic view on what is synthetic biology, we told examples, a timeline with the main discoveries/experiments, the main scientists and the trailer of the Genesis 2.0 film. After that we begun to talk abou what is iGEM, how it was created, what are the requirements to participate, what happen during the year and examples of previous wikis. The students got very excited and had many interesting doubts on what are the limits of cloning and the ethics applied, how in practical ways do you manipulate DNA and when they begin to form a team. We also show them one of ours bacterial culture plate with the letters "IPT" on it to explain our project. By the end we passed an online form about the feedback and who was interested.
20 minutes of what is iGEM for Biotechnology classes
In October 16 we return to Bandeirantes in order to speak to three different classes abou iGEM competition (Figures 4-6). We discuss the main topics such as: history, examples and how to participate. It was challenging talking abou a lot of topics in such a little time. Nevertheless, we raised 40 interested students, in a total of XX. Is important to notice that, differently from the science club, biotechnology class is an elective subject which means that students have to choose from one or other option. After these we are going to do another meeting regarding the organization for the next year, that we pretend on continue with this joyfull work. We hope to get some new ideas after the Giant Jamboree!
USP-Brazil
