Team:Aachen/HP/Gold Integrated
Human Practices
As part of our project, we strive to “go beyond the lab” when concerning ourselves with the topic chosen by us. The problem of drinking water scarcity as well as the pollution of rivers by industrial waste water are – sadly – often underestimated in Germany. Moreover, a majority of the population has reservations regarding genetic engineering and its use for the modification of living things. In order to reinforce awareness as well as interest for these topics and at the same time gain new knowledge on how to improve the implementation of our plan, we conducted two project days with a biology advanced course.
At the Marien-Gymnasium in Werl, in the first place we and the pupils dealt with the principles of genetic engineering. Thereby it was our goal to not only show demonstration experiments, but to actually integrate the pupils in our project. On the second day, they worked – instructed by two iGEM members – independently in the laboratory. After developing primers with the software Geneious, they amplified a fragment we needed by PCR. Thus, the pupils were able to apply their previously gained knowledge in practice and they got an impression of daily lab work. We received a lot of positive feedback from the pupils – at first, no one could imagine anything under the terms “genetic engineering” and “synthetic biology” or knew in which areas they are applied. We succeeded in making these terms tangible for the pupils, who considered the topic and the subsequent practical work very interesting.
Our team benefited from the project days as well. For one thing, we can now further use the fragments produced by the pupils. But most importantly we learned a lot about how genetic engineering is perceived outside of our course of study. We had expected before that there might be certain doubts, but not that there are so many ambiguities – even in a biology advanced course – and that genetic engineering is solely seen as harmful. We were now able to give the pupils an understanding of some aspects of our work, allowing them to form a well-founded opinion. And it has become clear to us that making our project and synthetic biology in general attractive to the public will require a lot more work.
Therefore, we have decided to participate in iGEM Team Dusseldorf-Cologne’s postcard campaign. The postcards designed by us and other teams include information about synthetic biology and will be sent to a large number of people, in order to improve their perception of genetic engineering and synthetic biology.
