Team:Heidelberg LSL/Project humanPractice
From 2012hs.igem.org
Human Practices
As the Heidelberg Life-Science Lab is a place where science meets interested pupils, for us, it is very important to draw the connection between our scientific work and the non-scientific everyday life. Many are not aware of the potential or the presence of synthetic biology in their lives and only a minority is fascinated of ‘synthetic life’ and wants to learn more. With our work, we want to encourage non-scientific readers to overbear possible prejudices, learn more about our work in the lab and have an entertaining insight into the various applications of our new biological system.
How can high-school students make ‘synthetic life’?
Being interested high-school students, we want to show that everybody can understand how synthetic life can be ‘created’ and how intelligible most of the methods are. With our many explanations and protocols, we want to support, encourage and introduce upcoming high-school teams, interested teenager, students or adults without vast knowledge to get involved with synthetic and molecular biology as an important future perspective.
Science interesting and intelligible - why not writing a book?
This is the idea of the technology writer Dr. Olaf Fritsche. His upcoming book ‘....’ explains how scientific knowledge arises and shows that everybody can understand facts when asking the right questions. Here, we have the great honour to be mentioned as an example for pupils doing science. We are very grateful and happy that he decided to report in a chapter about our iGEM project right from the beginning to its end at the Jamboree 2012.Why iGEMs and an Online Shop?
For our biological construct, we thought about a funny and innovative product that could be coherent with current trends. iGEMs, genetically modified gems, on bracelets and necklaces are a nice way to communicate our ideas to a great public.