Team:Hong Kong HKUST/Engagement
Team Hong Kong - HKUST
Education & Public Engagement
Synthetic biology is a new but fast developing field of biology. It is therefore unlikely that the public will have thorough understanding of it. Even more, we chose to focus more on the younger generations when we tried to explore the possible public engagement events for human practices as we believe that children show more interest in new ideas while having great imagination and thoughts on synthetic biology can achieve. However, our biggest challenge here is to explain synthetic biology in a much simpler concept to the children as we tend to use complex scientific terms in which will be difficult to understand for people without biology background. To conquer this challenge, our first step will be to teach them the concept of DNA.
1. Hong Kong Summer Science Party (Every Sunday from 23/07 to 20/08)
In the “Summer Science Party 2017” organized by the Hong Kong Science Park, we had arranged workshops introducing DNA models and DNA extraction from strawberries. This activity aims to educate children about biology while acting as a platform to converse with parents regarding to their opinions towards synthetic biology.
The target audience of this event is children from the age of 4 to 12. We hold the believe that we can ignite the interest for biology to children at an early age through fun games. We therefore uses candies as a material to make 3D DNA model which the children can bring it back home afterwards. Unlike the minipreps that we do in our lab, the DNA extraction workshop only uses easy and accessible household objects such as meat tenderizer and ethanol so children can try out the same experiment with different fruits to compare their DNA amount, imprinting them with first impression and a growing interest for biology at the developmental age.
In parallel, we had also chatted with parents there about synthetic biology and the goal of our project. We were able to receive instant feedbacks from them regarding to their understanding of synthetic biology and genetically modified organisms. With more than 75 participants in the survey, 58% claimed to have knowledge about GMOs. Within this group of participants, 63% knows that genes inside the organism is changed, while an equal percentage of participants also think that GMOs greatly affects the ecosystem. 54% of the people voiced GMO will negatively affect human health.
However, these responses contradicts to our research findings prior to the events. There is no valid proof that GM food is harmful to human health. Our team realized that this misconceptions and bias can be an important barrier to the advancement of synthetic biology, so we had elaborated more on this issue through our project introduction and written articles about synthetic biology which we had posted on a local science FaceBook page.
Using the same set of questionnaire, we also received feedbacks on opinions about our project, which some parents were interested and spent time discussing with us at our booth.
From these feedbacks, we were able to draft out an idea on how our future project would look like. We sought to interview with Prof. Terrence Lau who is knowledgeable about current GMOs situation in Hong Kong. It is also a surprise that GMO papaya is actually very common in Hong Kong, while our survey conveys that people know GMOs in a broad sense, but not the GMOs particularly grown in their country.
Throughout the interview, we sparked another similar idea that we can also tackle, which is the Genetic Containment Strategy, where we also care about preventing accidental release of the genetically engineered organisms, and we sought more in-depth detail about how to improve our construct to Prof. Matthew Bennett.
2. High School Workshop
Other than young children, we also educated high school students. The group of students we chose are in year 11 from SKH Kei Hau Secondary School and the United Christian College – Kowloon East (UCCKE)
a. SKH Kei Hau Secondary School (05/07/2017)
DNA extraction workshop has been used as a medium of teaching the concepts of synthetic biology. It allows students to implement scientific principles, while they can have fun learning science! We also taught the class about Central Dogma, Recombinant Biology and the Biobricks using minecraft as an analogy. Biosafety was also briefly discussed as it is our project’s main focus.
b. UCCKE Sharing Session: How to start an iGEM project (05/08/2017)
Unlike our previous activities where the theme circulates around synthetic biology and biosafety, we were invited by the UCCKE team to share our iGEM experience and general approach on how to design an iGEM project to high school students. After the sharing, a few high school students actually planned to join the iGEM in future!
For an easier brainstorming method, we introduced “Top-down Design” using summer vacation planning as an example, which is to build a system at hierarchical level (from large to small). We also mentioned some important issues that they should pay attention to. For example, biosafety and fundamental knowledges of synthetic biology.
3. Hong Kong 2017 InnoCarnival (21/10 – 29/10)
As Jamboree is coming close! We were also prepared to showcase this year’s HKUST iGEM project to the public in Hong Kong. InnoCarnival is a great platform for us to do this as it combine different projects across different universities with the theme of modern innovation.
We had an interview from the South China Morning Post prior to the InnoCarnival where we could share our iGEM experiences and ideas. In the booth itself, we had our handmade DNA cloning model, as well as our project’s animated video for better visualization and understanding. Leaflet containing biosafety information and our written articles were also distributed.
4. Synthetic biology articles
With positive feedback from our workshops in the Summer Science Party, we have gained a number of followers on our Facebook page. We therefore used this platform to teach them more about synthetic biology.
We have written articles to introduce synthetic biology and tackle the misleading perception based on the survey results we got during Science Park Party. We wished that by posting this on our facebook page, the followers we gained from the Science Summer will have a better understanding on the current GMOs issues and will contribute to a well-thought point of view.
5. “Synthetic Biology 1” Video Series Translation
Throughout our interaction with the general public in Hong Kong, one obstacles we spot out is the medium of instruction. While Hong Kong is a place where English is the secondary language, students especially from public high school are taught in Chinese. However, interesting sources for learning synthetic biology are not equipped with Chinese translations, which could act as a language barrier for any interested parties.
With great honor, we encountered Mr. Ariel Lindner who introduced us to the Synthetic Biology 1 page and invited us to collaborate in Chinese translation with Mr. Edwin Wintermute. We translated the English subtitles to Chinese and had produced a voice-over version for four of the videos shared on Synthetic Biology 1. Each video has both Cantonese and Mandarin versions. Our translated videos have been uploaded on bilibili website: https://space.bilibili.com/178821464/#!/ which is also accessible in China.
