Team:Peking/HumanPractice/SowingTomorrowSyntheticBiologists/Lecture

Summary

On July 14th, we gave a series of lectures to Beijing high school students, presenting a basic concept and research methods of Synthetic Biology and introducing affairs of the iGEM HS Division. The lectures turned to be a huge success. After the lecture, most of students came close to the Peking iGEM team members and actively asked for suggestion about forming an iGEM team.

Life as Machines --- Rational Design for Artificial Biological Systems

Figure 8. Lecture "Life as Machines --- Rational Design for Artificial Biological Systems".

The first lecture, "Introduction to Synthetic Biology" was given by one of our team members, Xing Wenmin. At the beginning of the lecture, Wenmin asked a question, "What is biology in your mind?", which strongly captured students' imagination and then led to our theme --- Life as Machines. This introductory lecture covered some fancy work of Synthetic Biology these years, such as the colorful and aromatic E.coli, as well as fundamental biological knowledge necessary for better understanding of synthetic biology, such as E.coli in the laboratory, central dogma, gene regulation and biosensor.

The second lecture, "Research guideline of Synthetic Biology" was given by Xiong Hongyu, our deputy team leader. He analoged the research guideline of Synthetic Biology to the engineering cycle and used a typical project, "A synthetic biological approach to solve heavy metal contamination", which is Peking 2010's project, as a demonstration. The lecture exhibited a research guideline as "specification --- design --- modeling --- test --- production" and revealed that the researching approachs have combined methods in multiple subjects such as physics, biology, and chemistry.

The last lecture, "iGEM HS-Division in a Nutshell", was given by Zhou Wenyuan, our another deputy team leader. As the most important part, the introduction of iGEM HS-Division is designed to motivate high school students to participate in the iGEM competition and so to encourage them to become future synthetic biologists. Hence, Wenyuan firstly introduced what iGEM HS-Division is and told the students what their American peers feel about the iGEM, who have previously taken part in the competition. Then Wenyuan introduced the application prospects of Synthetic Biology. Finally he took the team of Heidelberg last year as an example, seriously introducing the procedure of participating in the iGEM contest.

Then a sharing session was held to provide a chance for secondary students to ask their questions upon their new knowledge in Synthetic Biology and iGEM, and to share their opinions about this activity.

Figure 9. Students are seriously listening to the lectures.

Figure 10. Students are discussing the topics covered in the lectures.

Figure 11. Students are consulting How to establish a iGEM HS team to participate in the competition.

Figure 12. A group photo of Peking2012 team and Ms Zhou Lin, the Chief Secretary of BTSTC. (Ms Zhou is on the right hand side)

Reflection