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Human Practice

HUMAN PRACTICES – OUR INTERESTING

As we mentioned before, talk about Synthetic Biology to people not related with science is difficult. We though in a way to get us in touch with society and Synthetic Biology, for this we worked in High School. Reasons for working in High Schools:

 High Schools are very accessible.  Dealing with student is interesting and pretty fun.  Students are the best way to diffuse information.

In our Human Practice our main interesting for this year is letting people know about what is iGEM, Synthetic Biology and our Project. For this we were using newspapers, radio, Facebook, classmates, relatives, but the most important media for us were High School´s Students.

If Synthetic Biology is define as an art of engineering new biological systems that do not exist in nature, and is also redesigning existing systems so as to understand their underlying mechanisms (1), make students understand this is not easy at all. That’s why we needed to use an easy way to help students to learn about this topic.

We chose to begin, with Basic Science or Ciencia Basica, such as what are DNA, RNA, Cell, Genome, Gen and Living Organisms etc., then we continue with some others term a little more complex like Plasmid, Biobricks, PCR, Enzymes, Mutagenesis, Electrophoresis and Cell transformation. After that we continue with Synthetic Biology or Biología Sintetica, its importance to let people know why we called it Science Urgency, and also including a brief history of how this term was mentioned by Barbara Hobom in 1980, and how nowadays becomes a Science. Following this, we talked them about our project, the main idea, how we did it and why is this important for Panama.

Finally we show them, some examples of projects from others team, in this opportunity we used The Cambrigde 2010 project (link to Cambridge wiki), Australia Team 2010 project (link) and Berkeley Team 2010 project (link). The reason of doing this was to let them know of the variety and utility of projects, and how other teams design incredible projects. Also we show them some instructional videos found in iGEM 2010 website.

Most Students showed very interesting on this, some of them made interesting questions like one student from fifth year who asked how do we do to control changing DNA position (Mutagenesis) if all this is abstract? And also other students asked if this could be out of control or others just asked how they can get into iGEM