Educational Outreach

On an average, most people don’t know much about synthetic biology. Though, sometimes the opinions about synthetic biology are very critical and negative. We thought about projects to make synthetic biology sound like fun and very useful for several applications.
How could we combine a human practices project in this synthetic biology project? We thought about giving a positive twist on synthetic biology in the form of music. A lot of people fear for synthetic biology so making it sound positive, of course it also is, the point of view of some people might be changed. We found a church choir willing to practice a song with rewritten lyrics, so they sing about synthetic biology and iGEM. We recorded it twice, one time as a trial, and the second time with a nice recording system for optimum quality of sound.
Also, we wanted to teach high school students what synthetic biology is and know what their knowledge is so far
and think of it. To make it a little bit more appealing, we went to schools and gave besides lectures a practicum for the High school students.
Two schools were invited to participate in our Human Practices project: Twickel college and Montessorri College Twente in Hengelo. We went twice to each school: one day to give a lecture and show the students a movie about synthetic biology with a survey and the second day to give a practicum lesson where the students isolate DNA themselves from a kiwi. The DNA will be dried and weighted and the students with most grams of DNA will receive a prize! We started with a lecture where we explain the basics of biology, gene cloning and the relevance in synthetic biology. Afterwards, a short film about synthetic biology, made by a Dutch TV broadcasting company, will be shown. There is also a short fragment of iGEM in this film!
In this film, there is also a discussion about the safety of synthetic biology and there is even a little test by the broadcasting company itself to check whether the companies selling synthesized DNA are checking their costumers and the DNA what was ordered by the costumer.