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Science Communication
Science Communication
Introduction
From social media, we got to know that prostate cancer is one of the most common malignant tumors of the male genitourinary system. However, after interviewing some experts and sending surveys to the public, we founded that society doesn’t have a clear understanding of prostate cancer and methods to diagnosis it. To popularize that, we planned several educational works and public engagement activities both online and offline. By these changes, we displaced our project to the public which creates a safer and more convenient method related to synthetic biology on diagnosing prostate cancer as well.
Self-media
On June 11th, 2020, the team started our first self-media on WeChat as our main education self-media. Since WeChat is the most popular social media in China, we hope to introduce ourselves and knowledge of prostate cancer diagnosis to the public as much as possible through this commonly used platform. Starting from that, we published articles each week popularize synthetic biology technologies like PCR and RT and prostate cancer diagnosis as well as sharing our lab experience and project progress. Our survey is also sent through our self-media. During our publishing, we are delighted to gain some feedbacks and encouragements from the public.
Science exhibition
On August 23, we luckily attended the opening ceremony of Hangzhou Science and Technology Activity Week and hold a science exhibition together with the Worldshaper-Nanjing team and ASTWS-China team to state our points or results about our conception about the early diagnosis of prostate cancer. The passengers are basically the walkers from different fields. Some of them might be assigned to make an interview, while others are just the passers-by who happened to be here. The method we use simply is just to tell them how we are able to test cancer and show the mCherry results to convince our points. For better publicity, we have prepared posters, brochures, banner, stickers, games and electronic materials.
It is quite a hard time though. Before that, we would never know how embarrassing to talk with the passers-by about our project. Certainly, it is super likely to receive a confusing expression on their eye. And then they would try everything they can to just walk away and never return. While we suppose this should be the hardest thing to do. What’s after is the true hell. The citizens around that area have barely any knowledge about biology which makes it even harder to state our points.
We have gained a lot from this activity. Since we really feel the public's resistance to this topic, we are planned to do more to raise public awareness of prostate cancer. Also, we made a lot of effort to overcome the embarrassment and try to communicate with pedestrians like kept smiling for several hours, and initiatively introduced to others.
In showing the positives we had, we would like to talk about two ways that the hospitals would use. Simply one way is to just stick the finger or other equipment to test cancer. This is pretty painful and therefore, fewer people would tend to do that test. The other way which is the serum PSA test may give inaccurate results. Under that kind of circumstance, we thought about one idea. And this kind of idea is just the early diagnose of prostate cancer. By using the urine sanguinis of the potential patients, we are able to test some special protein that would only exist when the patients have cancer. Through different processes just like RT, PCR, and others. Especially the technique of toehold switch, this kind of method is just a fantastic way to finally trigger the special protein to show some color. We would finally be able to show the results by a special protein that has a special color, sometimes they are cherry and purple. The original model would simply be a kit that can be used at home or some community centers. And during that period, we also collect lots of valuable questionnaires to make the investigation become more and more convincing.
After the exhibition, we received some feedback and expectations about our project from the public and the people we met who are willing to help us. We are so honored that a report of our activities was written into an Hangzhou citizen magazine called Today Science & Technology.
Project Presentation
On August 30, we conducted a mini-lecture on our project for students in WFLA Bio-club (WFLA, Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy). Since most of the students in WFLA are very good at biology subjects, we don’t have to explain too much about the very basic concept of some biology term; yet we focus more on our experiment method and techniques.
As we all considered this time’s mini-lecture a useful practice for the final presentation, we prepared for the lecture for a quite long time in order to get our project clear to the audience, including making a detailed PPT, practicing our language, and labeled all the diagrams we will use in this lecture. We also expected to get some feedback from the audience so that we can make some improvements, both on our project design and presentation skills. Most students were interested in how our experiment is designed and others asked us some questions about the functions and efficiency of our device. Besides, we were not the only iGEM team to deliver a lecture on the project —ASTWS-China, Hainan-China, and GreatBay_SCIE were both invited to give a presentation on their projects. By comparing other groups' projects with what we have done to finish the projects, we found that our device and human practice part still need some improvements.
We were very glad to see our audience interested in our project as well as iGEM the competition. We also appreciated all advise from our listeners and other iGEMers. By taking all the suggestions, we make some immediate improvements and hope that we can have a better performance in the final competition.
Another public presentation we did was on August 12th in the financial summer camp. In order to get more communication with students in other fields, and give them the knowledge of synthetic biology and our project, we dug deep into our project and introduce it in three parts: About iGEM: In case they didn’t know what we going to say, we first introduce iGEM and some cases of synthetic biology to them. So they would better understand our topic. Dry teamwork: What we had to focus on in the dry team part is to illustrate those different aspects that we put our passion to. Including how we did our public survey, what was the outcome; how we interviewed the doctors from the clinical lab and urinary surgery to identify the possibility of building the kit, and the requirement we had to attain in order to use it in real cancer detection. Other than that, we also shared the art design by showing them the pictures of our team uniform and team logo. We specifically point out special elements used in the art design and how they are related to our team spirit. Our official account provided them with a new opportunity to share their ideas by creating one for themselves. Wet lab work: Since those students are not so familiar with molecular biology, we first introduced a few terms, then break the process down into a few steps, and take hair band as a metaphor to explain the special toehold switch to them.
It was a very precious experience, where we could do education in front of so many students who were just about our age. And we were all glad to bring our own idea and reflection to them and to be helpful to their project.
Game production
In August, we are glad to corroborate with the team KEYSTONE 2020 iGEM team. While they are producing a game about biology for middle school and high school students, we wrote scripts about synthetic biology like toehold switch and fluorescent protein for them. Since those students are novices in biology or haven’t learned anything about that, we described the knowledge and technologies in a more acceptable way. After successfully submit our scripts to KEYSTONE, we are able to expand our education ranges and gained new possibilities to introduce our project to different parts of society.
