Science Slam

Our project aims to make versatile control of biological machines easily possible for everybody. During conception we wondered how our human practice work could represent that thought and decided to organize a science slam an event which makes science available to everybody!

We believe that science must not only stay in laboratories and lecture halls but reach lots of people out there. And without a doubt, the walls of the reputed ivory tower couldnt stand throughout the evening of our event!

Furthermore, the science slam provided a platform for our slammers to share the passion for their project with more than just their colleagues and thus help to popularize their field. In ten minutes, they presented their topic in a playful and inspirational manner and the audience decided which slammer has managed to get them carried away the most.

We managed not only to give floor to a large variety of fields by our slammers from physics, medicine, psychology, informatics, politics and engineering but to make them be heard by a public which was very mixed indeed.

As a prelude to the event, we acquainted the audience with synthetic biology and our project by showing what synthetic biology can do for each of us. Distributed questionnaires during the evening showed that -as hoped- our presentation helped to leave a positive mark on the field of synthetic biology in peopleŽs heads:

For example, 97% of the people, who stated they did not know about synthetic biology before have got a proper picture of it during our event. 86% said, they are now familiar with the iGEM competition and everybody stated, they found the idea to combine the presentation of our iGEM project with a science slam very good or good.

The fact that our audience liked this topic had been reflected in our voting: Our representative for synthetic biology, Mogan Ramesh won the science slam. He originally comes from engineering but discovered his passion for superbacteria e.coli during his studies which he gladly shared with us. In ten minutes, he taught us that e.coli does not only work as eeew on our meal, but showed how his group studies on making e.coli work for us, e.g. producing pharmaceuticals.

How? For example, recombinant DNA technology can be used to modify Escherichia coli to produce human insulin. Mogans works within a group of scientist that investigate the metabolic network in the Escherichia coli bacteria cell. Attempts to raise the copy number of plasmid DNA have been successful, and the goal now is to understand how the cell has accomplished this task. Proteomic studies have indicated an expected cellular adaptation that agrees with attempts to raise copy number in the literature; however, the thermodynamic implications of these results have been minimally explored. The goal of a cell remains controversial; one explanation is that the cellular metabolism seeks to maximize the entropy (minimize the Gibbs energy) of the system. Using GAMS as an optimization tool, it is explored if the reaction paths that have proven to be the most likely are also the paths that minimize the Gibbs energy of the system.

All in all, our science slam has been a great success which demanded a reenactment from a lot of sites.

Here are a few impressions from our event:

Tobias Bald from experimental dermatology (University of Bonn) spoke about the Dark side of the immune system.

Prof. Dr. Herbert Dreiner gave us a review of Fukushima with full activity.

Our winner Mogan Ramesh shared his passion for superbacteria e.coli.

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Full house at our Science Slam.

Our audience obviously enjoyed the show.

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From 2013.igem.org