Team:LMU-Munich/Human Practice/Workshops

Workshop Concept

With the workshop we intend not only to inform as many people as possible about synthetic biology but we also want to encourage them to start a thinking process. By giving them background information as well as examples of synthetic biology a basis for further discussions about ethics as well as security and safety is laid.

The theoretical part - that consists of three sub-presentation - about basic principles of genetics, as well as genetic engineering and, last but not least, definitions, principles and exemplary applications of synthetic biology.

For better understanding of laboratory processes we included a few practical experiments. These contained the isolation of banana DNA, banana-smelling bacteria (transformed with BBa_J45200), as well as showing and explaining a blue-white-screening plate and hydras expressing GFP-fusion proteins.

Furthermore a discussion about possible risks and chances of synthetic biology takes place.

To conclude the workshop and let the participants apply what they've learned so far, we let them design paper BioBricks, as introduced last year by the team of TU Delft.

Report First Workshop

Our first workshop took place on Friday, September 2, in the Biocenter of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University. Our participants, aged 18 to 63 had little (based on high school) to no knowledge about the basics of molecular biology.

As already explained in our concept we had theoretical and practical parts. Our participants had lots of fun isolating DNA and most of them were successful!

During the discussion they expressed their concerns with synthetic biology as well as their hope that it might help to solve a number of problems, i.e. concerning health and environment. The most prominent fear was that of biological weapons constructed by rogue states. The question whether there is a worldwide authority that controls synthetic biology arose.

Further thinking about that topic led to another idea for our human practice part, a model United Nations resolution about synthetic biology.