Team:Heidelberg LSL/Project humanPractice

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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?

That is the scientific 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 of high school students doing research. We are very grateful and happy that he decided to spend one chapter reporting on our iGEM project right from the beginning to its end at the Jamboree 2012.

Why iGEMs and an Online Shop?

Right from the beginning we planned our project in the face of a useful application. 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 perfect way to communicate our ideas to a great public.
In our Online Store, interested readers can pre-book an article and are urged to explain briefly why this certain product would be most suitable especially for them. We would like to use this information to get an impression of the wishes of interested people in order to optimize our products and to get better insight of the common favour. Doing so, we want to show that we are eager to communicate with the non-scientific public and to encourage them in particular to think about considering iGEMs as a general possible application of small genetically engineered machines.

Link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/embed/FxsJ8zEONTs