Team:Exeter/Outreach/cafe

Café Scientifique is a nationwide project offering informal lecturers and discussions on new fields of immerging science. There are currently around forty cafés set up over the UK, offering science for “the price of a coffee”. Alice, Becca and James went along to deliver a presentation introducing both Synthetic Biology and our project.

^ Prof. Steve Hughes chairs the Café and introduces the talk.

^ Alice sets the scene.

The audience varied in ability, from young school children to wise old women who have devoted their lives to science, so we suited the presentation for everybody listening. This was followed by an interval and discussion with friends on the topic of “what would your project be?” The iGEM team wandered around to have small chats with the audience and we were staggered at the interest people had in our project! People were interested in everything from the business prospect to asking in detail how specific parts of the project work. This then brought around many questions how our project may be useful in the future and we led questions through the mic.

^ James takes up the baton.	^ The floor is open to questions from the audience.
^ The team mingles with the audience after the presentation promoted discussion and debate.

After this, a short presentation on human practices was delivered. Another discussion took place and many members of the audience offered interesting and thought provoking questions. People asked, for example, about how you could create polysaccharides which break down quickly and what would happen if our lab specimens got out into the real world.