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Team:Wageningen UR/DiscoveryFestival
From 2012.igem.org
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Discovery festival
As a national effort, all Dutch iGEM teams cooperated on participating in the Discovery Festival. This is a festival that is held simultaneously in three cities, and is a meeting point for art, science and music. As part of Discovery’s science program, we will educate people about synthetic biology and even let them experience some of it themselves. The Delft team dropped out at the last moment, but all four other teams made an extra effort to fill the gap and hopefully still make this event into a great success! The festival will be held on the 28th of September, and the Wageningen team will go to the festival location in Rotterdam to educate the visitors there.
To do actual science here, our team contacted a student of Applied Communication Science. For her Msc thesis, she is investigating how scientists communicate about their project with laymen. She will observe us on the Discovery Festival and so, there will be science within our science.
The festival
Discovery is a Dutch festival that, according to its own [http://www.discoveryfestival.nl/ website] (in Dutch) is all about the kick you get when discovering new things. Be it new science, art or music; Discovery tries to excite and stimulate its visitors with new experiences. Synthetic Biology, as an exciting new branch of science, deserves a place here. Together with the iGEM teams of Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Groningen, we will teach synthetic biology to the public and simulate a SynBio Experience. We will do this on all three simultaneous festivals in the cities of Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Rotterdam.
The SynBio Experience
The major part of our participation in Discovery is the SynBio Experience. We will build a provisional laboratory on each location, where people may have a taste of what it is like to work on synthetic biology. In just 20 minutes, they will go through a 7 step process of simulated genetic modification and get the opportunity to do all the work themselves. Safety is of course priority, so we will not bring actual GMO or even Escherichia coli with us.
In the first step, visitors may visit a specially built offline version of the Parts Registry to choose between several genes encoding colours or smells, to clone into ‘their bacteria’. In the succeeding steps visitors may manually pipet their DNA and bacteria around from one machine to the next, including a vortex, a table-top centrifuge, a make-shift electroporator and an incubator. After the last step, we show them an agar plate with the bacteria they made. These will not actually be GMO, but they will possess the phenotype that was selected in the first step.
The Poster Game
At the start of the festival, we want to stimulate people to think about synthetic biology and get them interested in us. In order to achieve this, our iGEM team made posters that describe amazing synthetic biology and iGEM projects from the past. We will walk around with these posters to ask people which of these projects they believe are true and which aren’t. We will invite them to our lab, where they may learn that actually all of the projects we describe are true.
The Idea-Box
To stimulate people to think about synthetic biology and the wealth of opportunities it gives, we invite them to share their thoughts on camera. Next to our laboratory, we place a video guestbook. Here we will ask people to share what they think would be a good use for synthetic biology. What should next year’s iGEM team make?
Cooperation
To make this happen in three different cities on the same night, we cooperated with all Dutch iGEM teams except the team from Delft, which bailed out at the last moment. We divided the tasks, such as getting lab equipment (in threefold) or designing posters, equally amongst the other four teams. Our team will provide several important lab attributes and we designed the posters that will be used. We also divided the locations: The Amsterdam and Groningen teams will attend the Amsterdam festival together, while the Eindhoven team attends the festival in their home city and we will go to Rotterdam.
Communication Science
As an extra addition to the Rotterdam version of the festival, our team will be joined by Paulien Poelarends. She is an Applied Communication Science student at Wageningen UR and for her Msc. Thesis, she researches communication difficulties between scientists and the public. To read a summary of her proposal click here.
Report
The festival is on Friday night, the 28th-29th of September. Because this is after the wiki freeze, we will use an external website to report it. After the weekend, a report of how things went may be found here: Team:Wageningen_UR/DiscoveryFestival_Report
