Team:Potsdam Bioware/SocialBrick

SocialBricks

SocialBricks in General

For us, the human practice part and bioethics in general are one of the most important bricks in sciences. To increase the acceptance of the society, scientists, junior scientists and politicians have to work together to improve the knowledge and the acceptance for the Synthetic Biology. The iGEM Potsdam Bioware 2012 agree with the statement that every scientist has the duty to inform the people about the advantages and risks of their work to advance public discourse.
To sum up all the human practice activities, we developed a term to describe the different human practice activities this year: the SocialBricks. The concept of SocialBrick is to divide every human practice activity in different parts to inform the people about Synthetic Biology in every part of the society. We hope that the term SocialBrick is listed in a registry in the future to show citizens what every team has done for elucidation.
In this year, we focused on two SocialBricks: “Science meets Politics” and “Science meets People”. For “Science meets Politics” we interviewed members of the German Bundestag for discussing about Synthetic Biology. For the latter one, “Science meets people”, we developed a survey to ask for the knowledge of Synthetic Biology and to inform the people about this topic. Especially, Synthetic Biology is often discussed controversially. One reason for these controversial discussions is a missing definition. That is a very important basis for discussion with politicians and citizens. Therefore, we use our own definition for Synthetic Biology:

Synthetic Biology is the molecular reprogramming of organisms. The aim is to create organisms with other features which are not discovered in this combination in nature. One important fact is that Synthetic Biology is a interdisciplinary science field and cannot be defined without genetic engineering.

The SocialBrick Gallery

Meeting with Prof. Dr. Schavan, Minister of Education and Research (CDU)	Interview with the Pirate Party Berlin	Interview with Mr. Röspel (SPD) and Dr. Rossmann (SPD)
Interview with Mrs. Mechthild Heil (CDU)	Telephone interview with Dr. Lehmer (CSU)	Day of Synthetic Biology 2012 in Potsdam
Interview with Mr. Gienger (CDU)	Poster presentation on congress for Molecular Interactions 2012 in Berlin	DNA isolation with children on the day of Synthetic Biology