Team:Technion/Human Practices/High School Lecture

From 2012.igem.org

Visiting High school

As a part of our effort to raise awareness about synthetic biology and iGEM we had given a lecture to the senior year high school students from biology class. We had explained the students about synthetic biology, iGEM competition and showed them few iGEM projects, including our own.

At first we were a bit nervous that a lecture maybe a bit hard for understanding and the students will quickly loose their interest. We were pleased to notice that students had shown great interest in the lecture - they took notes and asked more than a few questions, many of them concerning ethics and safety of synthetic biology research. Given the fact that safety breaches in such area of research may lead to very dangerous consequences it is good to see that even at school-age there is a safety awareness among biology students.

At the end of the lecture we had asked the students to think about possible ideas for future iGEM competitions. Some of the ideas were a bit on sci-fi side - like a biological lipstick with fluorescent bacteria, while others resembled actual ideas that were researched by iGEM teams - for example, programming bacteria to detect minerals and ground fertility. We also showed the students Petri dishes with fluorescent bacteria and showed them how addition of inducer triggers production of fluorescent products.

All in all visiting high school students was lots of fun. Hopefully, we managed to ignite the spark of interest in synthetic biology research at hearts of at least some students and they seriously would think about choosing synthetic biology as possible research area during their post-school studies.

Pics from the school