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Team:Heidelberg/HumanPractice/BroadPublic
From 2013.igem.org
Project
Notebook
Human Practice
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 therefore organized three open 30 minutes presentations on synthetic biology and our iGEM project followed by a question and answer session with the audience. More than 100 people from different backgrounds came to this interactive event, where we collected impressions before and after the talk in a “Live-Experiment” with the audience.
We started our presentation with the Live-Experiment: We distributed questionnaires with three different questions. Before the main part of our talk, the audience was asked to answer only question 1, which was either “What is synthetic biology?” or “What do you think synthetic biology is?” – each person 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. Later, we explained the concept and some projects of the iGEM competition and elaborated further on “The Philosopher’s stone” – our own project. 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 Life-/Live-Experiment. The latter two questions were: “What do you associate with synthetic biology?” and “Which questions remained unanswered?”. Here, we did not want to know, if the audience had listened to what we were presenting, but rather in what way the presentation had changed or broadened their opinion on synthetic biology. We intended to stimulate the communication between “science” and “the public”, but in order to do so, the explanations have to reach a certain level of abstraction in order to allow proper discussion. Receiving this feedback from the audience helped us to improve our way of presenting the project.
After our talk, many questions were addressed, concerning both the principles of synthetic biology in general and the ones of NRPS in particular. However, the vast majority of questions was not about understanding the biology behind “The Philosopher’s Stone”, but rather about the potential of synthetic biology and the concerns our audience had. Hence, the discussions following the presentations were highly interesting and offered valuable input for us, as we could feel that the major concerns of people are based on the fact that synthetic biology, for them, is 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 little experiment, the most striking result was that people who had stated that they did not have any idea what synthetic biology is exactly before our talk, did not at all write down “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 concerning these topics. Their clear focus is ethics, as many of them are philosophers, however, there are natural scientist, 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 interesting and valuable for a discussion. After our 1-hour long talk, interrupted by first questions, we entered 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 with 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 the boarders (i.e. when going far is going 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 happy 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.
We therefore organized three open 30 minutes presentations on synthetic biology and our iGEM project followed by a question and answer session with the audience. More than 100 people from different backgrounds came to this interactive event, where we collected impressions before and after the talk in a “Live-Experiment” with the audience.
We started our presentation with the Live-Experiment: We distributed questionnaires with three different questions. Before the main part of our talk, the audience was asked to answer only question 1, which was either “What is synthetic biology?” or “What do you think synthetic biology is?” – each person 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. Later, we explained the concept and some projects of the iGEM competition and elaborated further on “The Philosopher’s stone” – our own project. 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 Life-/Live-Experiment. The latter two questions were: “What do you associate with synthetic biology?” and “Which questions remained unanswered?”. Here, we did not want to know, if the audience had listened to what we were presenting, but rather in what way the presentation had changed or broadened their opinion on synthetic biology. We intended to stimulate the communication between “science” and “the public”, but in order to do so, the explanations have to reach a certain level of abstraction in order to allow proper discussion. Receiving this feedback from the audience helped us to improve our way of presenting the project.
After our talk, many questions were addressed, concerning both the principles of synthetic biology in general and the ones of NRPS in particular. However, the vast majority of questions was not about understanding the biology behind “The Philosopher’s Stone”, but rather about the potential of synthetic biology and the concerns our audience had. Hence, the discussions following the presentations were highly interesting and offered valuable input for us, as we could feel that the major concerns of people are based on the fact that synthetic biology, for them, is 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 little experiment, the most striking result was that people who had stated that they did not have any idea what synthetic biology is exactly before our talk, did not at all write down “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 concerning these topics. Their clear focus is ethics, as many of them are philosophers, however, there are natural scientist, 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 interesting and valuable for a discussion. After our 1-hour long talk, interrupted by first questions, we entered 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 with 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 the boarders (i.e. when going far is going 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 happy 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.
