Team:SDU-Denmark/Education
Involving Public
Citizen Science
With the article “No PhDs needed: how citizen science is transforming research” [1] Nature Journal points toward a new paradigm of conducting science. Here citizens are included in the research as data collectors and co-analysts. Science thus becomes nothing without the public. Still a young field, citizen science is not yet a defined methodology, nor is it perceived as an academic mentality. Still, the agenda is clear: to close the gap between citizens and researchers. Today’s post-factual society with fake news being a global threat is the incentive.
The PROSTATUS team adapted to the mentality behind citizen science early on. A debate with Thomas Kaarsted, a citizen science expert, laid the foundation for our further work on connecting publicity and science as well as understanding how the science we produce fits into the world. This preliminary reflection process ensured air time on Danish national radio, DR, and later a gamification campaign with men in the climacteric age as the target audience.
Lab to Radio
PROSTATUS arranged and facilitated the section in the daily radio programme Public Service, DR P1, with over 400.000 listeners. The genre called constructive journalism, or citizen journalism is the framework from which content is produced - in this case, synthetic biology and prostate cancer diagnosis.
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Constructive journalism (...) draws from the field of positive psychology and aims to counterbalance the negativity bias and, as a possible consequence, increase societal wellbeing by replacing cynicism with hope and apathy with civic engagement, and by lessening polarized debate” [2].
Listen to the interview (in Danish) here! and for the transcript in English click here.
With a conscious and solution-based approach to journalism, Public Service aims to regain trust between the public and the media treating controversial topics with a progressive and curious framing. As citizen science does, Public Service also sets a democratic scene where dialogues with listeners and stakeholders unfold from within. Appearing in Public Service, PROSTATUS unfolded how synthetic biology can be a tool to solve the biggest problems pressuring our societies today, as well as disclosing how we use it as a tool to detect malignant cancer in this year’s iGEM competition. As such, it was elevated to a national-levelled debate on the opportunities of synthetic biology.
Informational Campaign
As the project went on and epidemiology of prostate cancer was tracked down, we produced content for an informational campaign with the goal of early detection.
It is a known fact that gendered inequality in help-seeking behaviour exists, and with prostate cancer and side-effects as well as general illness among men are surrounded by taboos, we understood what social change we wanted to make. Studies show that 58% of Danish men express that they have too little knowledge of cancer symptoms and 23% state that they have close to zero knowledge of cancer symptoms. It was a no brainer; taking gamification-tools in use, we produced and designed a card game, card deck, toilet paper, conversation starter cards and an informational brochure about the prostate and men in climacteric age. Using such materials nudges the target audience to behave in the desired way - in this case detecting cancer early.
PROSTATUS don’t believe in raised fingers as a strategy to behavioural change, but rather progressiveness, lightness, yet substantiality, and fun. The campaign exemplifies the holistic approach to the development of PROSTATUS, acknowledging that technologies and individuals are interdependent on each other, each having and maintaining its own agency. Our hope is that the campaign contributes to destigmatizing men being ill and vulnerable. The campaign was launched in the public sphere with corona-safety as our utmost priority.
Workshops
On top of connecting the public with science, we in academic context also facilitated two workshops for the danish academy for talented high school students (ATU). Each PROSTATUS department educated the students about tools we make use of in the interdisciplinary development of a synthetic biology product.
First, the lab department introduced their work within synthetic biology context and furthermore arranged tasks for the ATU-students to solve. The students solved tasks such as prediction of the OD of a bacterial culture, applying the theory we had previously introduced to them. We prioritized to let the students build on their existing knowledge, as we in science communication find this important for progressive learning. To enforce a profound understanding of synthetic biology’s impact on our world, we coupled the laboratory lecture with lectures from hardware engineering as well. Here, the considerations on user-friendliness, 3D-printing etc. were taught. In Human Practice, a thorough introduction to key concepts in Philosophy of Science, such as induction/deduction, paradigms/hypotheses and the Value-Free Ideal, was given. The participants were asked to consider how values should be incorporated into scientific practices, using our project as an example. Additionally, we emphasized the importance of expanding academic work to also be relevant to the surrounding world it exists in.
In the second workshop, we held a detailed in-depth presentation on our project, which created the ground for understanding how synthetic biology can actually be applied in product development. Based on the presentation of our project, the laboratory department had designed three experiments for the ATU-students. These included plasmid purification, restriction enzyme cutting and finally running gel electrophoresis. The workshops were a success: we hope that we inspired future participants to be a part of the iGEM-experience!
References
[2] McIntyre KE, Laugh K. Toward a clearer conceptualization and operationalization of solutions journalism. 2019 Jan 3; Available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464884918820756#articleCitationDownloadContainer
