Team:Peking/HumanPractice/SowingTomorrowSyntheticBiologists/Lecture

On July 14th, with the help of Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club, we gave a series of lectures under the theme of "Life as Machines --- Rational Design for Artificial Biological Systems", presenting a basic concept and research methods of Synthetic Biology and introducing affairs of the iGEM HS Division. Hundreds of students have attended the lecture.

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.

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 and for guidance of their experiments. In fact, students from Beijing No.4 High School and The Second High School attached to Beijing Normal University are willing to form team to take part in the coming iGEM HS competition in 2013. The splendor of this occasion was recorded by the club and was put on its official wiki Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club.