Team:KU Leuven/Human Practices/Bottom Up Public

We reached out to the public in many different ways and for many different purposes. We evaluated our new approach towards the general public during our debate and symposium but we did not lose sight of our end-users. We interviewed farmers to gather information about their view on our project. On top of that we contacted the industry to see whether our project is a step in the right direction. We received a lot of interest from the industry and we got the opportunity to use their facilities to perform our own experiments. Amongst all this we did not forget to educate the next generation scientists and this is why we organised an educational workshop that we presented in schools all over Belgium.

The different parts of this approach are:
Hannah Arendt: We explained with the work of this philosopher why iGEM (and as a consequence our team) would like to make contact with the general public.
The end user: We involved the end-users (farmers) in our project. By interviewing both farmers and the general public, and in this way, having direct contact with them, our project improves already in early stages.
Education: Our goal was to get students in high schools interested in science, synthetic biology and to tell them more about our project and the applications of synthetic biology. We designed our own 3D-bacterial model, which gives the students an idea what a bacterium looks like. The workshops in the school consists of a presentation, some exercises where students can design their own systems and at the end, there was a experiment which proofs the fact of inducible genes. For the exercises, we make our own 'BioBricks' out of plexiglas. You can play with the BioBricks, like playing with lego and create your own systems. It's a good way of explaining the systems of promoters, genes and proteins.
Symposium & Debate: We organised a symposium with two scientific seminars, two iGEM-project presentations and a debate. The first presentation was a presentation of professor Johan Robben, who is one of our instructors. The second one was the presentation of professor Kevin Verstrepen who told more about how DNA does coding for new functions come into existence. We're glad that the iGEM-team of Groningen came to Leuven to give a presentation about their project. At the end of the symposium we organise a debate. The aim of the debate was to focus on the ethical issues surrounding synthetic biology in a way which is accessible to students, academics, but also non-scientists.
Press: After the symposium, we were contacted by several journalists who were interested in our project and our symposium. We got two articles in one of the most popular newspaper of Flanders and Flore gave a great interview on Radio 2 (the biggest radio station in Flanders). After the European Jamboree, the Flemish Television Broadcast (VRT) was interested and we got an item in the news. Almost 2 million people saw us on the news. Moreover, we got an article in EOS (popular scientific paper), Tertio (with three articles about the ethical part of our project), Flanders Today (English site with information about Flanders for expats) and FlandersBio. You can find an overview at our Press page.