It is of great importance for us to involve the young generation to a special extent, as they are the future of this society and also future scientists. All our team members have been curious children who had to get to the bottom of things. And of course we all remember when we first entered a lab. Is was thus an affair of the heart to invite high school students into the lab and to get them enthusiastic about synthetic biology.

Moreover, our project is designed to provide a sustainable alternative to conventional gold recovery; hence it affects especially next generations. We were therefore curious about what high school students think about our project and how they imagined the future if our project was to be realized. We held an essay competition where students from the Life Science Lab Heidelbergat theDKFZ (German Cancer Research Center) could participate and hand in essays dealing with the consequences and implications of bacteria-based gold recovery for either society and politics, economy and industry, the environment or on an individual level. We selected the best-written essays and invited the respective authors for a tour in our lab.

We are grateful for the inspiring input we received as the different aspects and target groups were covered by the individual essays. The essay we found describing these far-reaching consequences best was submitted by Isabel Marleen Pötzsch.