Team:Newcastle/HP Silver Jack
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Human Practices (Silver)
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
When considering reasons for the lack of uptake of biosensors, we chose to investigate one of the most fundamental aspects for the success of any project: communication. Communication also affects how synthetic biology and the many projects emerging from the field are received. Because of this, many of our human practices, education, and public engagement activities are centred around sharing the research and activities we have completed in relation to science communication. Our human practises work has focused on addressing technology uptake, which is one of the challenges that we identified to biosensor development and deployment. This took place in three main stages. First, we determined the current state of dialogue by consulting previous dialogue studies and reviewing how language is used in the media. We then generated our own guidelines to help future researchers to develop dialogue in a constructive way. Finally, we put this into practise by creating activities and sharing our work in a way that established a dialogue and encouraged discussion. Attending the N8 conference made us aware of the barriers which must be overcome to increase uptake of biosensors. Alongside other factors which we have identified and tackled through experimental and design adaptation, communication between scientists and the public is an aspect which we have considered in our aim of increasing uptake of biosensors and synthetic biology. In our work, we used different perspectives and methods to investigate science communication. By gaining advice from academics working in the humanities and social sciences, and completing our own engagement and research, we have taken a journey through science communication and considered how this can help the success of our project!
North-East Big Bang Fair
In July, we attended the North East Big Bang Fair- a large and exciting science fair. Over 2000 students and teachers attended, and we got the opportunity to talk to everyone about synthetic biology, iGEM, and our project! We had a few different activities to get the students and teachers involved with synthetic biology… ‘Build your own Biosensor’ is an interactive activity we developed to get the students thinking about synthetic biology independently. Many of the students did not know what a biosensor was, so this was also a good way to introduce the function and purpose of biosensors in an understandable and relatable way. We asked the students to think about what they would like to sense (an input), and how this would be detected (an output). There were lots of fun and creative responses!
We also had many great conversations with both school pupils and teachers, based around 4 main questions that we posed…
- What is synthetic biology?
- What do you think synthetic biology can achieve?
- How does the current curriculum tackle synthetic biology, and how would you change science teaching if you could?
- How do you engage with science outside of the classroom?
It was great to spread awareness of synthetic biology among the next generation of scientists, and even give teachers ideas for how they could introduce synthetic biology teaching into their lessons!
Synthetic Biology Communication Guidelines
As a culmination of our research into science communication, we have complied a set of guidelines for communicating synthetic biology to the public. These guidelines can be used for different purposes, including: to advise scientists when communicating about their work to the press; to guide in how to present to the public; and to help iGEM teams writing up their work! The guidelines start with some more general points to consider when you start to communicate synthetic biology. They also make use of the information we gained during the corpus linguistics research to suggest some more specific linguistic features to consider when communicating synthetic biology. Read the guidlines here: Breaking down the barriers: How should we communicate SynBio to the public?
Legislation
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