March for science

Frankfurt May the 4th 2019

Without exaggeration, we as human society are currently on a slippery slope towards alt-facts society. In the dire time of climate change, where strong data-based leadership are needed, we see many country leaders show the opposite of what is needed. They bend, ignore, and, even worse, sabotage facts and effort to face inconvenient truths. These leaders unfortunately are currently established thanks to the backing by significant part of uninformed public. This feeds a perpetual cycle where government starts undermining their own scientific departments and as consequences public will distrust scientific research and progress. All of this happen simply because of the inconveniences meaningful and verified results create. We as fledging scientists at iGEM Marburg feel the need to express our opposition against this destructive behavior.

Origin of the march of science and Marburg’s involvement

The March for Science is a protest march started in 2017 in Washington D.C. against the suppression of science and research. More than one million people participated in the first march 2017 that took place in cities all over the world. We at iGEM Marburg have joined this coalition and in 2019 we continue this tradition by joining 200 other people in Frankfurt edition of the march on 4th of May 2019. The importance of this movement is further justified with opening speech from Angela Dorn, minister of art and science of Hessian state.

Why we do it and the impact of our action

We understand as an iGEM team that our present and future work will help shaping society. Thus, we always constantly consider whether our projects are responsible and good for the world. The science march presents not only a chance to solidify our stance against post-truthism, but also an opportunity to engage with general public about our research and iGEM. Our team members got into conversation about iGEM and potential application of genetic engineering with other fellow marchers; exchanging about concerns and considerations with them. This has helped us creating a project that is responsible and good for the world.

Hessentag 2019

For this year’s Hessentag we went to Bad Hersfeld to represent our iGEM project and the SYNMIKRO of the Philipps-University of Marburg. 862.000 people joined the Hessentag 2019. This makes the Hessentag to the biggest event in Hessen where many different topics are represented, like art, music, sports, animal welfare, nature or science. Under the motto „Hessen schafft Wissen“ (eng.: Hesse creates knowledge), we introduced children and other interested people to scientific experiments and the basics of (synthetic) biology. This project was supported by LOEWE, the state research field of Hessen.

We taught how to read the genetic code, how to do microscopy, had a little puzzle to solve, showed pH indication at the example of red cabbage and extracted DNA out of pepper.

On the first day we shared our area with an informatic-engineering group of Darmstadt. Luckily on the second day we had the stage for ourselves. Due to the great weather a huge amount of people stopped at our location to listen attentively to the molecular background of our experiments.

Also on the second day, the very famous moderator Willi Weitzel from Germanys TV show „Willi wills wissen“ visited our stand and extracted the DNA out of pepper, successfully.

We gained great feedback not only from the kids but also from their parents who looked sometimes more amazed than their children.

Many thanks to Tanja Desch who organized the stand for us including all that’s part of it.