Team:Heidelberg/Outreach

As our project is designed to provide knowledge to a broader spectrum of people, we believe that it is of very high priority to inform the public about our project and to receive feedback and personal perceptions from the society. Hence, we build our concept for the interaction with the public upon four pillars: First, interaction and cooperation with experts from multiple scientific fields, second, interaction with the society in general and third, the young generation in particular. Finally, a close cooperation with artists is the fourth pillar. We round off our human practice advance by bringing together these four pillars under the roof of a talk evening on our future with synthetic biology, allowing interaction and discussion among them. We highly value interaction with scientists or experts of different scientific areas as a crucial point within the work for a project as a student team. Though we may work hours and hours doing in the lab on our specific field of interest, it may be the words of someone who is not at all involved that lead the project to a better outcome. Hence we discussed our project with multiple experts in order to obtain different feedback concerning various aspects of our work. Our reference persons (whom we are very thankful for sparing their time with us) were: Prof. Dr. Rainer Zawatzky, safety representative of the DKFZ for scientific input and safety concerns, Dorothea van Aaken, pedagogue for environmental education and representative of the BUND for safety concerns, the secular humanists Heidelberg for ethical input, the Federal German Armed Forces for safety concerns and finally TBM Edelmetal Recycling (a company in gold recycling) for technical input.