From 2012.igem.org

2. Educational outreach

The core contact point between science and the broad public is communication. The welfare of nascent scientific fields highly depends on the communication- and discussion-capacity of scientists as well as on the openness, knowledge and acceptance of society. Therefore, in addition to our practical wet lab work and theoretical philosophical analysis, we also wanted to introduce people of different ages to the novel field of synthetic biology. Since we believe that informing the public spreads understanding, promotes acceptance and avoids pre-judgement, we used most of our free time to communicate our work as ‘synthetic biologists’ particularly to children, high school students and undergraduates. Because we think disregarding the importance of appropriate ways of communication is definitely a counterproductive attitude, we tried to didactically match the content of our presentations to the age and background of the people we met. We also included our own thoughts about the metaphorical language of synthetic biology (see Philosophical Analysis [Hyperlink, XXX]) to give unbiased and clear information of synthetic biology, its products, possibilities and risks. Our educational presentation of synthetic biology has four sections: