At Aix-Marseille university, we think that the public engagement is crucial for science. Helping science and technology awareness for all must be a priority. Therefore, we chose to participate in some events, giving us the opportunity to explain synthetic biology and molecular engineering to the general public.

This topic was particularly important for us, in France, because the public image of GMOs and synthetic biology is generally awful. Our team wanted to establish communication with the public to converse with them about benefits and drawback of synthetic biology.

March for Science

One of our first event to participate into was the March for Science that happened in Marseille the 22nd of April. We felt very concerned about this topic since we all are in the scientific field. We thought participating in science events was a way for us to extend our message farther and to show our support to scientific institutions. Encouraging scientific research is an investment for the future generations, and science should have a greater role in policymaking. The first step toward that goal is for us, scientific communities, to learn how to reach out to the public, and we saw in this event a good opportunity to do so.

Provence Agricultural Fair

We went to the "Salon de l'agriculture" at Salon-de-Provence. This gathering unites farmers and olive growers from all over France, to showcase their products and find out about recent developments in their farming sector. This event allowed us to discover how aware olive growers are of Xylella fastidiosa, it also gave us the opportunity to find out what kind of product would fit their needs (injection, spraying, soil treatment..).

Thanks to this event we were able to reconsider the project design to fit olives growers needs and design environmental tests to carry out.

Marseille Science Village

A "Science Village" was organized in Marseille. We saw this event as an opportunity to share our project with the public. So we made a poster about synthetic biology and our KILL XYL project to present.

We also realized that this type of event gives an opportunity to communicate to children about biology and science. Therefore, we organized an experiment for children extracting banana DNA. Lots of children were curious and interested in biology and some of them even proposed new things to do with the help of synthetic biology (e.g. Banana with the taste of kiwis).

Biotechnology forum

Polytech Marseille organizes each year a biotechnology forum, we used this as an opportunity to present our project to engineering student and teachers. We gave a talk and a poster about our KILL XYL project.

We got alot of interesting feedback about our project. The forum was great fun and we presented the iGEM competition to new students. This will help to recruit a new team next year, full of motivated and talented students.

Public survey

Public opinion should always be taken into account in all product conception and design steps. Therefore, we did a public survey, first to increase awareness of the problem posed by Xylella fastidiosa, and second to find out their opinion about our project.