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Education & Public Engagement

It's all about TOLERANCE

In our project we set out to induce immune tolerance. This lead us the virtue of tolerance in a societal sense. Just as we set out to “teach” our bodies tolerance in the lab, we worked hard to educate for tolerance in the community. The Israeli society is unique for its variety of communities composed of different religions, ethnic groups, cultures, nationalities, languages, opinions and beliefs. Our team is a representative sample of this cultural and religious amalgam that makes Israel so special. Our team consists of Muslims, Orthodox Jews, Haredi Jews, immigrants, Atheists and Agnostics. This summer we learned firsthand how important and fruitful working together can be. It is for this reason that we believe raising awareness and encouraging public discussion about tolerance is so important.

In light of this vision, we used multiple methods to spread our message of tolerance to various populations in Israel and around the world while educating about synthetic biology throughout the whole process.

On the educational front, we organized a conference on the topic of "science and theology" for religious women from the “Bnei Menashe” community. The purpose of this conference was to expose this unique community to science, and show that religion and science are not mutually exclusive. We organized an activity for children with physical and mental disabilities on the topic of "tolerance to oneself.” Furthermore we created a permanent educational program about the immune system for a children’s science education center in the socioeconomic periphery. We have also created an immune system craft kit for children similar to the one we designed for the science education center. We are currently in discussions with multiple toy companies regarding manufacturing and distribution, with the goal of sharing this important knowledge globally.

Beyond the many educational activities we organized, we worked very hard to engage the public. We initiated a "tolerance challenge" on social media. Individuals and groups from all over the world sent diverse and thoughtful pictures of themselves holding a “Tolerance” sign. This campaign was designed to raise awareness and show the world that tolerance is a global value that people from all backgrounds can agree on. We even organized a community run titled: “run for tolerance!” Dozens of citizens came to support and raise awareness for this important cause. In an attempt to reach a wider audience, we created a video about the city of Shefa-‘Amer, an outstanding example of tolerance and coexistence. To date our video has been shared hundreds of times and viewed over 17,000 times, spreading our message of tolerance throughout the world. Lastly, we wrote an “Ethics Handbook” in an attempt to delve deeply into the moral social issues concerning our project specifically, and iGEM as a whole. We sent this handbook to iGEM HQ in the hopes that it may serve as an official iGEM ethics resource that will help future iGEM teams in their ethical analyses.

To conclude, we organized multiple educational activities on synthetic biology, created valuable tools for the iGEM community, interacted with a large variety of populations, and raised awareness for the common virtue of tolerance among people globally.

For a much more detailed view of each activity please look through our human practice pages!