Team:Heidelberg/Human Practices

Human Practice
Overview
Scientists don’t simply sit in the ivory tower of scientific research. Nowadays the role of a scientist is much more manifold. We see our role as scientists not only in delivering meaningful research results, but also in reaching people and educating them. The times of the pandemic showed that people are interested in learning about science. We took it as a chance and engaged with the public in many respects. In an online Science Slam we connected with other iGEM Teams from all over the world. Together we shared our projects in an interesting and exciting manner, so that even people without scientific background could understand it. To us it was also important to spread our enthusiasm about synthetic biology to students, because they are the next generation of scientists. Therefore we designed a course program introducing highschool students to the typical methods of a synthetic biologist. To make it as easy as possible for teachers to implement this program at their institution, we added a teacher version and accompanying material. To expand the public outreach we started our interview series. Experts from various fields shared their knowledge with us. Not only we learned a lot from them, but also people from all over the world, since we uploaded everything on our YouTube channel and Social Media.
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Science communication

To us Human Practices means communicating science to the public, educating them and while doing so also share our enthusiasm about it. A format that combines all of this is a Science Slam. In order to reach as many people as possible we hosted an online Science Slam in which iGEM Teams from all over the world presented their research in an entertaining manner. We were really happy to welcome UNIL iGEM from Lausanne, iGEM Team Manchester, iGEM Team Imperial College and the iGEM Team from the Ashesi University in Ghana.

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Education

The next generation of scientists is in the starting blocks and they have a great thirst for knowledge. Not only limited to the topics they already know about, but also to get from theory to practical application and to dive into new topics. Just like the members of our team most school pupils never get in touch with synthetic biology. - It is never really spoken about. We wanted to change that and bring synthetic biology to high school students! Therefore, we developed an experiment booklet for teachers at student research centres all over Germany.

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Expert Interviews

Discussing scientific projects and ideas is immensely important and valuable to learn from each other, get new ideas and develop them. This is why we decided to talk to as many scientists and stakeholders from the very beginning of our project. Especially in an upcoming field like synthetic biology.
Therefore, we met many experts from various fields. We talked to physicists, politicians, science journalists, teachers, and experts in the field of medical informatics, systems biology and many more. All of them shaped our project and gave us extremely valuable advice, how to make our project better.

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Collaborations

Collaboration is the key of science. iGEM is not only a huge team-work but also working together in one giant project towards a more convenient synthetic biology. To do so, we worked together with iGEM Manchester on a Wiki-Meta Analysis, joined the Postcard Challenge by iGEM Team Düsseldorf, the iGEM Meetup by iGEM Marburg, the iJET Paperplane by iGEM Aachen and iGEM Darmstadt as well as the iGEM Flashmob by iGEM Moscow.

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Integrated Human Practices

Working for months on an iGEM project means being on a journey. It’s a process of continuous development and improvement that can not be achieved alone. We talked to many professionals with lots of experience, who gave us valuable advice and guided us on our journey.

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Safety

Working safe and secure is the key essential for good lab work. We cannot take the risk of danger for ourselves or the environment. This is why we decided to carefully investigate the characteristics of the chassis and materials we used in the laboratory.