Science influences very different aspects of our daily life. It is critical to health, economics, food security, and safety. Being part of an iGEM team brings us even closer in touch with what it means to be a scientist and how important the acknowledgement from public policy and society is for our work.

To celebrate and strengthen the role of science in policy making, our iGEM team joined the March for Science in Dresden on April 22, 2017. The initial “Scientists March on Washington” was supported by a series of marches in more than 600 other cities all around the globe. The main goals of the march were to support evidence-based policy making, government funded research and transparency in science.

As young scientists, we walked through the baroque city center of Dresden to demonstrate what value scientific research has for our community and that scientifically proven facts should be taken more seriously in political decisions. The acceptance of the consensus on climate change and evolution has also been one of our major concerns which is why we put a lot of effort into our iGEM goes green initiative. Taken together it has been a remarkable experience to show solidarity with the world wide scientific community and to stand up for our values and interests - We marched forward with Science.

While researching into sustainable lab work we discovered that there is already a community that shares our concern: Labconsious, an open resource supporting researchers using green lab initiatives to improve efficiency and reduce the environmental footprint of bench science supported by New England Biolabs (NEB). We followed the blog on Labconscious with interest and contacted Nicole, the editor of this webpage. She kindly offered us to publish two blog posts on her website to extend our outreach and helped us to share our “Green your lab” poster via Labconscious.

We are looking forward to meeting Nicole after the Giant Jamboree at the NEB Campus in Boston. She will interview our team and publish the story of iGEM goes green in one of her blog posts. Furthermore, the iGEM goes green initiative will be the content of an episode of NEB TV.

When searching for ways and places where to plant a tree, we came across the forstbotanical garden of our university. They do not just collect trees from all over the world, they also consider them to be an important part of global carbon and water cycles. Dr. Ulrich Pietzarka is interested in research of drought-restistant plants and offered us to plant a bur oak, Quercus macrocarpa which is drought and fire resistant itself. We were given a guided tour through the forstpark and support for planting. We are glad that we decided to choose their offer, our payment of 100 € is perfectly invested into the nurture of our tree.

As part of giving back to the community, we hosted a booth at the Long Night of Sciences, an annually event taking place in many cities throughout Germany. We focused on introducing iGEM and synthetic biology to the public in Dresden. We tried to increase awareness of the beauty and ethics behind the things we do. To keep all ages entertained, we had Legos and gave instructions to kids on how to build BioBricks. Different colors of big bricks corresponded to different genes, like fluorescent proteins, smaller bricks corresponded to different promoters and so on.

We also offered strawberry DNA extraction, where kids could extract DNA by mashing them with their hands in bag of soap and then extracting the DNA in cold ethanol. As the children were entertained with their Legos and strawberry pounding, we presented our project in synthetic biology to their parents and all the visitors of the Long Night of Sciences. People were introduced to the latest research in biotechnology and expressed their deep interest in BioBricks and synthetic biology in general. At the end of the day, successful young scientists were able to take home a tube of strawberry DNA and parents were left in awe of newly acquired kids' skills.

Some impressions: