Team:Duke/Collaborations/MosquitoForum
Should We Engineer the Mosquito?
Creating the Curriculum
At the Southeastern Mini Convention our team, in collaboration with Gaston Day and East Chapel Hill High School, modified curriculum from the Building with Bio kit. The forum last year centered around Malaria. At the convention, one of the issues we discovered last year was that it was hard to get people participating in the forum to get excited about Malaria. While it is still a prevalent disease it was not something that we found easy to talk about. Therefore, we decided to adapt the material of the forum for a different disease. We decided to adapt the material for Zika. We chose Zika because it is a big problem and has been causing problems surrounding mosquitos and bees, we thought there would be more interest around the new topic.
With our idea, our teams set to work to update the curriculum. The original documents on Malaria can be found here. The documents we created can be found here:
| Instructions |
Vaccine Tech Cards |
Gene Drive Tech Cards |
| Zika Disease Profile |
Personelle Profiles |
After we created the new curriculum, we held an event hosted by scientists, graduate students, and Duke iGEM on campus to engage with the Duke student body on the topic of bioengineering mosquitos to combat disease. Science, economics, and ethics will be explored through interactive activities. Below are pictures from our event. Overall, we had a great time discussing these issues with our peers. Below are also reflections from team members as well as our guest speaker, Adim Moreb.
 |
"I really enjoyed inviting my friends to the event and showing them the ethical aspects of our research project. In addition, our discussion of the role of the government in regulating bioengineering and gene editing was very interesting." |
|
"It was fun sharing my passion for synthetic biology with the greater Duke community! Also, I loved debating against those who believed we shouldn't engineer mosquitos." |
 |
 |
"It was a lot of fun interacting with undergrads! Fielding their questions helped me better understand how younger students are learning bioengineering and that will help me when giving future lectures." |
