"
Team:Bielefeld-Germany/Public relations Overview
From 2012.igem.org
Overview
An important part of iGEM is Human Practice, which we understand not only as communication with a broader public but also as reflection of the project in a general aspect. This includes biosafety and biosecurity, social aspects as well as the implementation of the project into industrial processes and evaluation of experts and environmental issues. Therefore economical factors and political terms have to be considered. Finally we want to show the potential of the project as a possible realistic alternative to conventional and traditional methods of waste water treatment concerning the depletion of steroid hormones as estrogen and other pharmaceutical relevant substances. In the sections expert, politics and industry we tried to evaluate our project in economical manner with the consideration of political terms. The sections environment, education and outreach focus on social aspects, including the environmental situation and communication with a broader public.
Expert
In this section you can read more about the expert classification we got for our project. We presented our project to get feedback for our ideas.
We attended at the strategy process "Biotechnologie2020+".
The CAS conference for Synthetic Biology gave us the opportunity to present a poster about our project.
Politics
Here you can find our project evaluation with Rene Röspel, member of the german parliament, the ''Bundestag''.
For the development of a project from planning to application political terms are important. Not only the economical factors but also the public opinion and acceptance depend on the political situation. Furthermore bioethics are especially important when developing a project in modern life sciences. Therefore we discussed about bioethics as well as regulations.
Industry
An important part of a project development is the evaluation in cooperation with potential partners. Therefore we visited two sewage treatment plants and together with the plant managers we could work out an easy way for a future application. For our potential application when plan to use existing structures to present a real alternative to commonly used sewage treatment.
Outreach
In Germany people are very suspicious when it comes to Synthetic Biology. Despite of strict regulations and decisive risk and technological impact assessment the public opinon is marked by prejudices and anxiety for biotechnology. Therefore outreach is a central part of every German iGEM project.
To inform the public the German iGEM teams arranged a SynBioDay, that was held all over Germany. We presented posters, organized experiments and as a special additional we invited the iGEM team from SDU-Denmark to help us.
We did a waffle sell and a poster presentation in our university.
Education
Synthetic Biology is new and unknown life sciences. Therefore we hosted a student academy for interested pupils to learn about Synthetic Biology. The student academy was addressed to talented pupils of higher grades in order to deepen their understanding of molecular processes in cells. Together with the pupils we worked on practical experiments, while telling them about SynBio. Of course we also took the opportunity to present our project to a young audience and had an interesting discussion.
Environment
We wanted to evaluate the urgency of the current situation in marine ecological system. Therefore we had an interview with Nicolai Fricke, an expert of the Heinrich von Thünen-Institute of Fisheries Ecology.
Press
Here you can find the articles to our project. Feel free to take a look, because we tried hard to have an open communication with the public. That's why we published two press releases and fortunately triggered a huge media response: many many web pages took up our press release resulting in several articles in online magazines and articles in the printed press. Furthermore we talked in two radio broadcastings and are part of a TV documentation about SynBio.
| 55px |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | 
| 
|
