Team:Uppsala-Sweden/HumanPractice/Protocol

The human practice approach of Team Uppsala-Sweden this year has been to focus on how to recognize an alternative approach to human practice and at the same time include presentations and being featured in journals to such a large extent as possible. The achievements have been to perform presentations, getting attention in journals and at websites but we also had the opportunity to write an article in the magazine Biologen (transl. The biologist). Thereby we have in a large extent displayed ourselves and the subject synthetic biology to a vast and varied crowd of people.

Biologen is a magazine that is presented to biology teachers from secondary school up to high-school level. Our purpose of writing this article was to present synthetic biology in a simple but informative way and to present our project and the participation in iGEM. We also put emphasis in urging to educate both the readers themselves and their students in the field of genetic engineering and synthetic biology as an approach. We feel that teachers have the pedagogical tools to educate in a simple and informative way and because of that they are the perfect target group and tools for the purpose of spreading knowledge. At the same time we took the opportunity at hand and presented the possibility for them to be a part of high-school iGEM.
Here we present the theoretical approach of spreading the information to teacherers and thereby indirectly to the students resulting in an vast increase in the information flow. In the picture below we present the information flow by directly or indirectly passing on the information to a second and third part resulting in a small spread of the information.
In the next figure the information flow by passing the information to many teachers as done in the biologen magazine is presented. These teachers can in turn give their information to the students. This can theoretically result in a huge information flow where the awareness of synthetic biology will spread massively compared to single presentations done by us as an iGEMteam or just by one individual teacher. Though this has to be considered as an theoretical approach, but in any case this way of passing on the information will result in an increased flow of information than that can be provided by an iGEM team alone.

The first presentation was held at Uppsala University during “DAX”, an event dedicated to the biotechnology students of Uppsala. One of the main purposes of the presentation was to introduce and explain the field of Synthetic biology. But also, through iGEM and our project, putting it all in a context. While the aspects of synthetic biology were important, a greater reason behind our involvement was to enhance the awareness of iGEM. This was not limited to the competition itself, instead much emphasis was put on its concept.

The nature of the event made our presentation particularly successful. This was due to the fact that all the participants were majoring in biological engineering program. Therefore they were very receptive to the information. This enabled us to establish a greater interest for synthetic biology and iGEM, among listeners ranging from first-year to fifth-year students. In a sense this was what we were hoping to accomplish. Just as iGEM is promoting the standardization of synthetic biology – “biology done easy”, the members of team Uppsala-Sweden have had the underlying goal to standardize and promote Uppsala’s participation in iGEM.

The presentations we had was one at the high school, Katedralskolan in Uppsala in front of a class of students studying nature science with the focus of biotechnology. At this presentation we first addressed the areas of application with synthetic biology approach and then we performed a workshop where the students were urged to think of their own synthetic biology invention. After the presentation we were told by the teacher that the whole event was successful and that the students were inspired by synthetic biology.