Human practices is a big part of iGEM. Our mission is to explain people what we want to reach with our project and what synthetic biology actually means. A lot of people are still afraid when they hear about genetic engineering and genetically modified products, due to unlucky inccidences that are related to this topic. By spreading out our knowledge we want to make sure that people get educated in this field to build up their opinion without prejudices in the future.
As we know that education starts with young people and the next generations will be responsible for our future we aimed to go to schools and education exhibitions to start with our outreach work here. For this we are going to visit the Biotechnological Gymnasium (High School) Albstadt and the Abi-Startschuss Messe in Stuttgart. Our focus is to explain kids what synthetic biology provides for the future and how many interesting and diverse career opportunities they are in this field. We want to explain about iGEM the competition itself and the chance what it means to work as a team on a completely autonomous scientific project.

By inventing an sustainable, eco-friendly tube cleanser for every household we also want to know how the public reacts to our project. As the marketing and commercialization of a tube cleanser that one can buy in the supermarket is out of scope due to time limitations, we know that the research we do is not sufficient. Nevertheless we believe that there is great potencial in our genetically modified tube cleanser and we want to know how the public would react to it and what consequences the use of it would have. For this we visitied the Institute of sanitary environmental engineering and water recycling of the University Stuttgart were we had a very interesting interview with Dipl.-Ing. Carsten Meyer from the department of wastewater technology. Furthermore Mr Meyer gave us a tour through the wastewatertreatment plant and explained us all in detail how the cleaning process of the wastewater works. The institute is not only doing research but also actually cleaning the wastewater of the University Stuttgart and parts of the surrounding suburbs.

We also realized that outreach goes hand in hand with our fundraising work. To convince people to sponsor our project we have to indicate the people and explain them why it would be worth it to finance the eco-friendly tube cleaner. Therefore we made a big tour from south to north Germany and visited the Lab Supply Exhibition 2017 in Münster. Four of our team got familiar with the different exhibitors that participated at this day. It was a great exchange of knowledge as we not only got the chance to introduce our project to the different companies, but also to get informed what is recently on the market to equip a good laboratory. It was the first time for us to get the chance to visit Münster and we were happy to get a sneak peak of the city after a successful outreach day.

During the last few month we realized that outreach work is not only important but also gives you great opportunity to make collaborations, to interact with different experst and to collect new ideas and trouble shooting solutions. One of our big mentoring teams this year was the iGEM Team Köln/Düsseldorf 2017. As they were the first iGEM Team of their University in 2016 they knew excactly what problems we faced. Not only taking us by the hand and giving us great support and advices during the whole time, they invited us to their SynBioDay 2017 in Düsseldorf. Once again we crossed Germany improving our driving and navigating skills and were welcomed by a highly motivated team that organized this open day for the public and for experts. We can’t explain how happy we were to participate at this day. Not only did we get to know a whole bunch of other iGEM Teams that introduced their projects, but also heard many interesting talks from experts that introduced different topics of Synthetic Biology. After a very informative day, a filled stomach and fully loaded brain we ended the day with a very interesting discussion about the ethics of genetic engineering and Synthetic Biology. Here experts and non-experts could explain and exchange their point of views. Thank you iGEM Team Köln/Düsseldorf – it was a blast!