Broad Public. Engaging a Broad Cross Section of Society.

We have put great effort in communicating with various groups within society and to engage a broader cross section of society in our project, since synthetic biology and our iGEM project in particular has implications for every individual. We as researchers (-to-be) aim to improve lives by solving problems and are therefore working for society. Yet, we can only offer solutions, which have to be approved and applied by the public. Moreover, national and international legal frameworks limit every scientific action, which again, lie in the hand of the people. To promote the dialogue with society, we organized a talk evening addressing the question "On the Way to a Synthetic Future?" in cooperation with the Biotechnological Students Initiative e.V.and the Helmholtz-Initiative for Synthetitic Biology. Moreover, we introduced synthetic biology and our project to interested students and families from local high schools and engaged in discussions with the Secular Humanists Rhein Neckar and Dorothea van Aaken, pedagogue for environmental education and representative of the BUND for safety issues and ethical considerations. We further summarized our experiences and ethical considerations in an assay.


We want to improve communication between science and society, based on a common language and common basic knowledge on the issue. Together with last years high school iGEM Team from Heidelberg, we held three open 1 hour presentations on synthetic biology and our iGEM projects followed by a question and answer session with the audience. More than 100 people from different backgrounds attended this interactive event. We collected valuable feedback by our “Live-Experiment”: We handed out questionnaires with three different questions, which was ansered by the audience in two parts. Before the main part of our talk, our guests were asked to answer only part 1, either the question “What is synthetic biology?” or “What do you think synthetic biology is?” – each individual could decide which one accounts better to his or her knowledge on synthetic biology. In our talk, we first gave a brief introduction to synthetic biology, explained the concepts of some iGEM projects and elaborated further on “The Philosopher’s Stone” – our own project, before last years high school iGEM Team from Heidelberg presented their project iGEMs - Unveil the Invisible. Finally, we gave our personal conclusion and outlook on our future with synthetic biology, i.e. opportunities and risks when implementing synthetic biology further into our lives. Before offering time for questions, we ended our presentation with the second part of our Live-Experiment. The latter two questions were: “What do you associate with synthetic biology?” and “Which questions remained unanswered?”. Here, we of course did not want to know, if the audience had listened to what we were presenting, but rather in which way our presentation had influenced their opinion on synthetic biology.

After our talk, many questions were addressed, concerning both the principles of synthetic biology in general and NRPS in particular. However, the vast majority of questions was not about understanding the biology behind “The Philosopher’s Stone”, but rather about the potentials of synthetic biology. Many of our guests pointed out their concerns regarding missing safety and regulation of synthetic biology. They strongly asked for more transparency and communication by scientists and industry. In contrast to that, many people underlined quite the opposite. The discussions following the presentations were highly interesting and revealed that the scepticism to synthetic biology is mainly based on a lack of knowledge compared to a black-box. Our task as young researchers is to bring light to the darkness, open the box and show society that synthetic biology – strongly abstracted – is building, not playing, with building bricks.

When analyzing our questionnaire experiment, the most positive and striking result was that people who had stated that they did not have any idea what synthetic biology exactly was prior to our talk, did not write down any “open questions” concerning the understanding, but rather ones highly stimulating the discussion. This and the feedback some people gave us directly, tells us, that they understood the main ideas of our project.


Furthermore, we were invited to the secular humanists, a group of critical minds with a broad range of interests, such as ethics, philosophy, politics, natural sciences, who meet and discuss current issues. Their main focus is ethics, as many of them are philosophers, however, there are natural scientists, economists and linguists as well. This mix of characters, approaches and expertise made it both challenging to present the project appropriately (i.e. on a suitable level of abstraction) and highly exciting and productive for a discussion. After our 1-hour long talk, often interrupted by critical questions, we engaged in another 2 hours of discussion with the entire audience. Everyone was eager to ask explanatory to drilling questions and to give their opinion. The range of questions was, as indicated earlier, quite broad, ranging from “What exactly is the sense of your project?” to “Is synthetic biology at all controllable? If something has economic value, people won’t be able to control it, right?”.

We also performed our Live-Experiment on the secular humanists, and when analyzing the feedback forms, it was clear that we had talked to philosophers: questions like “Is there anyone (or any institution) who has the authority to set legal boarders? And when is going further too far?” or “Isn't synthetic biology somehow a second industrial revolution? Only that the steam engines we're building have the ability to change when we're turning our backs on them?” remained unanswered. But although not all questions could be answered, we are very thrilled about the lively discussion and new food for thoughts for the further project.


With Mrs. Van Aaken, who not only is a pedagogue for environmental education, but also member of the BUND, we talked about the impact of synthetic biology on environment and on our lives in general. We cannot foresee all consequences and the impact our actions will have for the future – which accounts for both, the interactions of our “creations” with different ecosystems as well as the impact of synthetic food or medicine on our bodies. The evaluation of possible risks arising from them has to be done according to the specific use of the synthetic product. Furthermore, we should return to our essential needs instead of the urge to pile up cheap goods and wealth at the expense of nature and the poor.

Besides this general issue, we also considered the question whether synthetic biology is an artificial process or rather something natural. When interacting with the non-scientific public in general (see below), a common association to synthetic biology was “artificial”. However, we can ask whether synthetic biology actually is human-made artificial or accelerated natural evolution. Addressing these questions in the discussion with Mrs. Van Aaken lead us further in the very theory behind science in general, hence, what natural sciences really are, what nature is and whether our quest for knowledge and technological advance is part of human nature. These considerations opened up an entirely new point of view on what we as scientists-in-training were doing and hence, we thank Mrs. Van Aaken for broadening our horizon during this enlightening afternoon!