Publicizing iGEM and synthetic biology

Our team has also held many lectures , introducing iGEM as well as synthetic biology for the students in Tinsghua from different departments in Tinsghua. Via the introduction, we We encouraged the students attending our lecturesed to join our 2013 team for 2013 via the introduction. Over 50 applicants apply handed in their application materials with expression of strong interested interests in synthetic biology , one of them even planned to choose synthetic biology as his perspective Ph.D field research of interest for future Ph.D studies field. After two rounds of selection and discussion (we had even argued with each other about the admission of applicants for 7 hours until the mid-night.)

We take took advantages of any activities activity in our university to advocate publicize iGEM and sSynthetic biology to our universitythe students., during In the a scientific exhibition heold by our university school, we exhibit presented the Tsinghua iGEM projects in the previous years, and introduced the synthetic biology as well as iGEM competition background knowledge to anyone many people interested.

Even the vise-vice president of our the university was attracted by our poster.

He listened to our introduction carefully and asking asked a lot of questions about the potential application future and potential of synthetic biology. He was very exciting and He said excitedly that encouragement should be given to the school should encourage more students to participate in the competition to expend broaden their horizons.

Collaboration with other iGEM team is one of our best traditions. We believe that we can all learn from each other via these events, and bring the idea of synthetic biology to a larger population.

The Association of Synthetic Biology in Tsinghua is the base of the team because it is the origin where all sorts of ideas are brought up and discussed. Owing to it, we have a better understanding about our project and synthetic biology itself.

Movie Series

The movie series of Tsinghua IGEM team constitutes another important part of Human Practice of our team.

In recent years, a growing number of reports related to severe illnesses including cancer and cardiovascular diseases keep raising awareness of health issues among Chinese people. In many cases, environmental factors weigh more than genetic problems in causing those diseases. Hence, paying attention to the food we eat, the environment we live in is definitely of a great importance.

In response to the awareness of the public, programs introducing different methods of health care in everyday life are very popular on massive media like TV, internet or radio. Introducing health care knowledge itself is becoming a kind of business attracting people of all walks of life to make money from them. Among these programs, some are not as qualified as others in term of professional understanding. However, owing to their speaking skills and commercial operations, some of their misleading theories are even more popular among the public. One example is a man named Wuben Zhang. He claimed that bark is the most important part of a tree because even a thin circular elimination of bark will result in the death of the tree. Mung bean is a popular star in his theory, because according to him, mung bean has the power to cure almost everything. Thanks to him, the price of mung beans doubled in only three months because too many people bought a huge amount of them.

The fact that so many people believe in him really astonished us. What seem to be common senses to us are sometimes not well understood by others, and knowledge related to biology and health care happen to be extremely important for everyday health and discriminating right from wrong. Being a student majored in biology, we feel like it is our duty to help the public understand more. But knowledge itself is usually something boring to memorize, while what we want to emphasize is the interest to study biology. As a result, we came up with the idea to create a series of movies introducing interesting facts in biology. Especially, the movies were taken in the form of stop motion animation, which brings a lot of fun to the series.

Making a movie is not easy. We started by writing our own scripts. Then by using cardboard and plasticine, we got our major actor and actress. Other talented team members were responsible for filming, voice playing and post production. Final products were posted on video websites including youtube, and these videos have by far been viewed for 6500 times in total. We also received many positive feedbacks from the audience. One video about neuroscience even helped a high school student to review for exams.

Novel

A very dramatic events happens in our team and trigger us to create a new method for avocation of synthetic biology as well as the profound discussion of the system chosen of synthetic biology with different iGEM teams. At the very early stage when our team was still experiencing the brainstorming of the project, we had a heat debate with the advisor of our team. We want to use yeast as system since its safer and more suitable to achieve our “switchable box” conception. Yet advisor worried that since iGEM laboratory do not use yeast system in the previous years, the costs of establish a new system might be too much and thus do not support us to continue our idea. At that time, every team member was anxious and even upset, because we think it is obvious that E.coli is not the idea system for our design. One team member wrote a very funny yet actually alluded novel on facebook, the major part of the novel is to describe how a very smart girl try her best to get 5 hundred million dollars even regardless of her life. It is very attractive and just let the reader to wonder why the girl want the amount of money so much. But the surprising ending is that the girl use the money to synthetic a part of the yeast genome and use that to participate the iGEM competition. The novel has a amazing hits (over 7,0000 hits) and are shared by over 4,000 people. You can see the original version of the novel via this link: http://blog.renren.com/blog/244418821/895276049?bfrom=010203042 (unfortunately it is in Chinese rather than English ) After that, many people from different universities E-mail me and discuss the background of the novel. Then our team member introduce the synthetic biology as well as iGEM competition to them and we have a heat discussion about the system chosen of different synthetic biology topics. I should say it is amazing that many people even don’t know there are many systems beside E.coli can be used in synthetic biology. But we change the recognition of them via the content of the novel as well as substantially discussion. Then we found that facebook is actually a very useful and effective platform for synthetic biology issue discussion and propaganda. We establish a common page for synthetic biology on facebook-like website and we make several short films which are very funny but triggers profound thinking of synthetic biology , like ethic issue, does synthetic biology can be used for sex exchange? We introduce this question via the content of one of our short film. We put them on the website and get very good responses. Now the common page are pretty hot and own many fans. Actually we think any topic and especially the synthetic biology is quite close to everyone’s life, closer than those affairs of superstar. Thus everyone who are not major in biology, who don’t know synthetic biology are actually have the knowledge and are able to make suggestions to synthetic biology. Yet the information nowadays explode in internet and for most of the people , the major source of information are from internet as it is fast and more convenient, thus few of them might notice the poster on the wall or are patient enough to listen to a whole lecture with the unattractive topic like” what is synthetic biology? XX tell you A to Z” and so on. Thus the best way to evoke the awareness of people to synthetic biology is by utilizing the resources of which has been used for hotspot news spreading. And also, use the attractive method for avocation. Our team successfully using the same method evoke the heat discussion of the people around us ( in China, since the website are mostly been used by Chinese students) about synthetic biology issues, specific in contradiction of suitable system chosen and funding. We believe the same way works in other synthetic biology issue discussion.