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Team:CSIA SouthKorea/outreach
From 2012hs.igem.org
- We think it is important for the people to know about synthetic biology. Appropriate knowledge frees people from bias and equips them with discretion. In general, correct knowledge make people to be free from irrational fear toward genetic engineering. As high school students who have just entered this field, we felt that is would be important to publicize synthetic biology. Of course synthetic biology is a relatively new field in biology and is rarely introduced in high school biology classes.
- We believe that as much as synthetic biology appeals to people, it is more likely that biotechnology in whole will be accepted by the public. People avoids buying GMO and prefers organic foods. Some feel that that biotechnology in general is about 'manipulating' DNA. We thought if we tell very young students that such technologies have more potential than danger, it might change people's stereotypes.
- We created a brochure for middle school students and had synthetic biology class in NGO.
Contents |
Creating a introducing brochure about synthetic biology
- Although synthetic biology is a fascinating field, it is not well known to the public. Especially in Korea, there aren’t many ways in which young students can get to know synthetic biology. There aren’t many references nor materials that can be easily read by students. So most of the students lack knowledge about synthetic biology – some may even not know what that really is. Since we hoped to share our understanding of the synthetic biology work, we made a small pamphlet that explains DNA, synthetic biology, and iGEM. We wish it would be a helpful material to all those who wish to introduce synthetic biology to everyone!
- We expect these simple, easily explained pamphlets to let students understand basic of the synthetic biology, and let people learn more about it. They might be interested in it, or feel easier when they come across the field of synthetic biology later on.
- We also introduced iGEM at the end of the brochure, too.
- The files we made is now distributed to several institutions, not only including schools but also institutions and teacher's associations.
- Feedbacks are always welcome!
- UPDATE : Here is the English Version, Too!
Synthetic Biology class in Suri Nature School
GMO quiz class
- Suri Nature School located in Gunpo, Korea, is a NGO that runs educational programs for teens. CSIA_SouthKorea participated as mentoring students who discussed students with subjects related to biology and genetic technology.
- A student in Suri nature school wanted to learn about GMO, so this is the worksheet designed to solve any basic questions regarding GMO.
- We made this quiz to grasp some basic notions about GMO & to let people know that there are some questions in genetic engineering that cannot be clearly answered "Yes" or "No"
- We made several students in Suri Nature school to solve the quizzes, and some of them were surprised by the fact that DNA is so long and it is digested in the intestines after taken by the body.
Extracting DNA from Broccoli
- Students of Suri Nature School became curious about what DNA is, and we thought that doing DNA extraction experiment would be a nice way to let the students to see DNA by themselves.
- We distributed the following experiment manual to the students and guided the students to do the DNA extraction experiment. We used broccoli to extract DNA from.
A Published Column
- Juyeon Han, one of our team member, attended an international seminar on GMO and LMO. After the seminar, she wrote a column about the seminar, and it was published on the magazine 'Biosafety' (vol. 11, no. 4, page 38~39).
- The following is a translated version of her column (the original one was written in Korean)
