Team:TU Munich/human/highschools

Ethics class at the high school of Puchheim (Gymnasium Puchheim) We spend two days at Gymnasium Puchheim, a high school near Munich. The first day visited a biology course at senior level. First we introduced ourselves, iGEM and our project. We explained our plasmid design and workflow with the help of a comic. The students were enthusiastic about the comic and even tried hard to understand the details. They already had a good background of knowledge of the most of the basic principles like digestion with restriction enzymes, ligation and gelelectrophoresis. Now they were fascinated about the actual application of such techniques. In the second part we arranged four stations where the students could do some smaller experiments. We wanted to introduce them do our everyday work in the lab. At one station the students tried out gelelectrophoresis, completing their theoretical knowledge. They prepared a polyacrylamide gel and watched a three-colored gel loading buffer run in the gel. At another station they learned pipetting with activated charcoal in water. Our mathematician explained the mathematic background of the bacterial growth to the students and showed them a program that calculated the cell number after a certain time. The student’s favorite part was to isolate DNA from bananas and stain it with coomassie blue. The yield of big clots of DNA lead to incredulous and enthusiastic faces. “That is really DNA?” “Do we have so much DNA as well?” It was a nice day and not only the students and the teacher learned a lot. We were taught what questions and misunderstandings can arise when confronted with our everyday work, but as well how you can inspire people by taking the time to explain the background and even let them try labwork themselves. We think our little workshop let the students see that synthetic biology is no magic but real science that can be comprehended.

On our second day at Gymnasium Puchheim we discussed synthetic biology with an ethics senior class. As with the biology class we introduced ourselves, iGEM and our project. The students and the teacher were highly impressed by the prospects of synthetic biology. We showed them a tube of GFP and explained its role as a genetic marker and a driving force of synthetic biology. Afterwards we outlined some ethical problems related to genetic engineering to them. The students read several texts, abstracts from papers and newspaper articles about different topics. We picked bioterrorism as a discussion topic because of the current EHEC (enterohemorrhagic E. coli) outbreak in Germany. As the source of the EHECs could not be determined at first it lead to speculations in newspapers that the outbreak was an act of bioterrorism. We outlined the possibility of engineering hazardous bacteria or virus. They read an abstract about the regenerating of the Spanish influenza virus of 1918-1919 that killed about 50 million people (1). Another abstracts was about the redesign of bacteriophage T7 (2). These abstracts showed that resurrecting and redesigning viruses is technically possible and already done but as well that these studies are conducted to better understand hazardous organisms. The students agreed that a better understanding is the best protection against bioterrorism. We as well informed them about the biological weapon convention and the safety regulation for work with genetically engineered organisms in Germany. Another example we discussed with the class is the so-called pharming derived from farming and pharmaceutics where transgenic animals are engineered to produce therapeutic proteins. We read some newspaper articles and a short abstract that declared pharming as a cheap way to produce recombinant proteins. The subject of pharming received antipathy from the students. They stated that they would prefer a more expensive production in cell cultures because the suffering of animals cannot just be justified by higher profits. They admitted as well that if it was the only way experiments with animals have to be accepted. As a conclusion the students made a pro and contra list for synthetic biology on the whiteboard and we discussed the single items. Both sides had an illuminating time spent together. The students with no biological background were happy to learn about the topic of synthetic biology, that will be a major ethical matter in the 21st century. They were grateful to have "experts" of the field to answer their questions. We benefited from their frank evaluation of the topic, they opened up some completely new concerns to us. However they ensured us, that synthetic biology is a powerful tool for research and has the prospects of being very useful for mankind.

References: 1. Tumpey T., Basler,C., Aguilar P., (2005) Characterization of the Reconstructed 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic Virus, Science Vol. 310 no. 5745 2. Chan L., Kosuri S., Endy D., (2005) Refactoring bacteriophage, Mol Syst Biol. 2005; 1