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Team:Peking/HumanPractice/Sowing
From 2012.igem.org
Summary
This summer, Peking iGEM team has guided HS students in Beijing towards future participation in iGEM HS Division, by forming alliance with official organizations in Beijing to make it a long-term program, giving quality lectures introducing Synthetic Biology & iGEM to students, and directly teaching HS students to prepare for their incoming contests in 2013, both theoretically & experimentally. We hope this HP project, which is entitled “Sowing Tomorrow's Synthetic Biologists”, could promote intelligent young minds to contribute to the fascinating subject.
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Motivation
Synthetic Biology possesses enormous potential for the applications in boosting a nation’s economy and improving people’s lives, as well as enhancing people’s understanding of the origin of life. As an emerging field combining conventional biology with physical sciences and engineering principles, synthetic biology calls for more lively and intelligent young men and women to generate ideas with considerable potential. This was the motivation for the 2012 Peking iGEM team’s human practice project this year, “Sowing Tomorrow’s Synthetic Biologists”. Based on this goal, we desired to motivate the young minds of high school students to study synthetic biology and guide them towards future participation in the iGEM high school division.
Achievement
1.We briefly made a survey regarding high school division iGEM in Beijing and distributed it to students at The Second High School attached to Beijing Normal University (SHSBNU) in order to learn about these students and their interests regarding synthetic biology.
2.We formed an alliance with the Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club (BTSTC) in order to make our human practice project a long-term plan. We also managed to propagate for the lecture we intended to present to high school students.
3.In mid-July, we gave a series of lectures, “Life as Machines --- Rational Design for Artificial Biological Systems”, to Beijing high school students. We introduced to them the idea of synthetic biology and the iGEM competition, and motivated many of them to participate in the iGEM high school division in the future.
4.We wrote and disturbed a questionnaire to these students after the lecture, and by analyzing this data, we obtained crucial information regarding their opinions and intentions, and even obstacles in their way. This made the next step clear for us.
5.Guided by the questionnaire, we wrote a report to apply for funding for iGEM-HS in Beijing, and began to guide three students from the SHSBNU towards their future participation in the iGEM competition.
Introspection
In addition to propagating the knowledge of Synthetic Biology and iGEM to students, we thought it was necessary to aware them of the dangerous problem Synthetic Biology would lead to, such as biosafety issues of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and biosecurity issues about bio-arms, since this burgeoning field are absorbing more and more researchers in and spawning more and more products out. That is why we managed to evoke government, teachers, and students' cognition of related ethic issues regarding Synthetic Biology during the whole "Sowing Tomorrow's Synthetic Biologists" projects. And most importantly, that is why during our actual guidance for the three high school students, we managed to motivate them, our future synthetic biologists, to contemplate the problems by themselves. As opposed to the propagation of iGEM contest and SB knowledge, the propagation of bio-ethic issues are much harder. We still have a lot to do in the future.
