Team:UNILausanne/Education
Science Communication & Education
The Transcriptome blog
The Swiss-Swedish beginning
In the early days of our project we discovered different aspects of the iGEM competition,
including Human Practices. Hence, we brainstormed about ideas as well as about ways to implement
them. Around the same time, Pablo (meet him here: Team) learnt that his friend, Leti, was part of
iGEM Chalmers-Gothenburg team (check out their work here: link) in Sweden. This led to the idea of the
Swiss-Swedish collaboration.
We wanted to work together on something that would not be dependent on our projects, as they were not fully defined at that time. Quickly, we came to the idea of building a blog, since members of both teams were passionate about sharing their knowledge about science and synthetic biology. During one of our discussions, we brought up the issue of the language barrier in science. Most of scientific writing is in English, and that is also the case for most science communication. We decided to focus on the latter, as it allowed us to have more freedom in both content and form. Youtube channels, TED talks or blogs about science are mainly in English, so they may not reach people who are not fluent in this language.
Our common goal of a multilingual blog was set, now we needed to make it happen.
Starting The Transcriptome blog
After having explored other possibilities, we decided to host our blog on a private domain
(https://thetranscriptome.com) and manage
it through Wordpress (https://wordpress.org).
We could implement a language menu and offer a dark mode for late night readers.
Keeping the costs relatively low, we could keep our blog publicity-free as well.
Having joined forces of two teams, we were a group natively speaking seven different languages
(English, French, Swedish, Spanish, Japanese, Polish and Italian). In contrast to most of the
existing sources, we decided to reach the people who might not be able to fully understand texts
or videos in English.
When writing our posts, we followed the generally established rules in the scientific community,
from citing the sources to explaining all of the terms used in a text. Some terms do not need
explanation within the scientific community, but do need that outside of it. We paid special
attention to making a clear distinction between our personal opinions and facts. An original
text was usually written in English, so each of us could make comments and corrections. When it
was ready, we translated it from English to other languages. This way we could make sure that
the text was clear, easy to understand, and could potentially even be used as a way to learn a
foreign language by comparing two versions. However, it is important to underline that meaning and
clarity were prioritized over a "word for word" translation, so the texts might be slightly
different.
Topics
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a big wave of biological and medical news. It showed us that some topics are unclear or even controversial, for example wearing masks to prevent the spread of the virus, its origin or even its existence in some extreme cases. We thought that helping others have a better understanding of how our cells and bodies function, might help recognizing true information. Basic knowledge about our immune system, zoonoses or microbes helps to properly understand the news about those topics, and to make the right choices.
Not to become monotonous, we wanted to cover different subjects as well. We made a post about
the iGEM competition and shed light upon a few examples of outstanding women in science. As a
part of the most renowned synthetic biology competition, we introduced our readers to this subject
as well. We have written about what synthetic biology is, about its origins and the tools used in
this field, such as synthetic gene circuits.
We posted one article per week, here we listed them all:
- Vaccination: How does it work?
- The central dogma of molecular biology
- Origins of life: Are we aliens?
- Our cells are chimera
- What is cancer?
- Are we responsible for the SARS-CoV2 pandemic?
- GMOs: next revolution or hazard to avoid?
- Awesome women in science
- The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (guest post by Violette Defourt from iGEM "Rapidemic" Team Leiden, Netherlands)
- The historical perspective of Synthetic Biology
- Plastic Biodegradation (guest post by members of iGEM 2019 Synbio Amazonas team, Brazil)
- What is iGEM?
- Synthetic biology: is it magic?
- Synthetic gene circuits
- Fourier Transform: not just an analyser of Frequency (guest post by iGEM NCKU Tainan, Taiwan)
- Innate Immunity and Endometriosis: Bridging the Gap (guest post Emily Schiller, Team UteRus from Rochester, USA)
What is yet to come?
We are really happy to have collaborated with all the people and teams listed above, and we would like to thank them again for being a part of this project. A special thanks goes to Sybio Amazonas, who translated our texts into Brazilian Portuguese, making it an eighth language on The Transcriptome blog. Involving other people allowed us to show new ideas, discover new subjects and have a different insight into science.
The Transcriptome blog is now a platform to communicate with the public. We have figured out
all the technicalities, and wrote the guidelines to keep the writing format consistent as
well as we made a document with instructions on how to adapt the style and manage the blog from
the author's side. It also makes collaborations among the future teams much easier.
That is why we want to encourage future iGEM teams to take over the blog and share their texts,
their work and their views. With enough people interested over the years, it could become an
always growing, changing and adapting channel of science communication. We would love to see
The Transcriptome go on - even after our adventure with iGEM is over.
Fréquence Banane
Fréquence Banane (https://www.frequencebanane.ch)
is a student association active at the University of Lausanne, University of Geneva and EPFL. Through its radio
station and website, it informs about university life, offers entertainment programs and promotes cultural life on campus.
It is the perfect association to promote synthetic biology and iGEM, especially since it reaches students from all faculties.
We decided to contact Fréquence Banane and proposed a collaboration. Léa Humbert, a journalist from the association,
was very excited to write an article about the competition. We told her about our project and iGEM's philosophy.
The article she wrote can be read here: "An alternative to chemotherapy: Unil's iGEM Project". This collaboration allowed us
to spread the word about synthetic biology and the iGEM competition to a wide audience and hopefully to motivate more people to
take a dive into the world of synthetic biology.
NUL - Nouvelles Universitaires Lausannoises
NUL stands for “Nouvelles Universitaires Lausannoises” (https://www.asso-unil.ch/nul/) and is a newly created association at the University of Lausanne. It scours the campus relentlessly in search of exciting news and incredible stories to make documentaries. By the greatest of chances, it turns out that Léa Humbert (journalist of Fréquence Banane) is part of the NUL association and, in addition to the article, she proposed to create a documentary on iGEM and our project. With the help of Julien Lessert, another member of NUL, and two talented film makers, Rebaz Hama (see his work here) and Fouzi Baba-hadji (see his work here), several scenes of the documentary have already been shot, including some with the iGEM teams from EPFL and UZH. The documentary will soon be available on the NUL website (link). It was an extraordinary experience to be able to collaborate with NUL on this documentary. It will help to promote science in general and synthetic biology in particular. We hope that, thanks to this documentary, other young scientists will take part in the competition soon.
Heidelberg Science Slam
We also participated in the Science Slam organised by the iGEM Heidelberg team.
During this live-streamed event, we presented B.O.T to a wide audience. This opportunity helped us reach the international public,
and talk about synthetic biology.
Click here to see the video
Women in STEM
For the B.O.T team science communication and education is not only about experiments, but also about the scientific community. That’s why we made a series of interviews about gender disparities at different scientific levels. This video highlights the differences in personal experiences between men and women and raises public awareness of gender inequality issues. We also spoke with an expert from our university about the measures now being used to combat this problem.
Watch the video here.
