Team:BostonU/Education/Building with Biology

Building with Biology

We recognized that while our research was foundational and not immediately ready for any particular applications, it was still important to consider downstream uses and to engage in constructive dialogue with the public. We were able to accomplish this by collaborating with Wellesley on their museum exhibit prototype, and found a similar way to impact the wider community this summer by participating in a unique museum education opportunity called "Building with Biology". This was a pilot event hosted by 8 museums across the country, including the Museum of Science in Boston, in order to teach museum goers about synthetic biology and spark informed dialogue between scientists and the public.

We worked closely with Museum of Science coordinators, local research scientists, and even the Wellesley and MIT iGEM teams to lead different synthetic biology activities that could spark public discussion. The Museum of Science coordinators allowed us to learn about different prototype activities, and let us each pick a few activities to run on August 1 and 2, 2015. We went to an initial museum training, and learned not only about different activities but also how to engage the public, how to start dialogue, and how to properly run a museum exhibit. Oftentimes, scientists come across as condescending to members of the public when they speak about science, so we wanted to avoid this in order to best interact with museum visitors.

The discussions that we sparked with museum goers revolved around either big concepts in synthetic biology (synthetically producing biodiesel, engineering crops and food, creating new genetic therapies, etc.) or what synthetic biologists do in the lab on a regular basis (plating cells, using genetic recombination techniques, pipetting, etc.). We primarily focused on introducing synthetic biology and addressing any questions, comments, and potentially any misconceptions that museum visitors had.

Through this experience we got to work with visitors of all ages! We were stunned and impressed with the knowledge and curiosity that younger children expressed. They really understood a lot of complicated analogies, such as cutting and pasting genes together or packaging DNA into viruses like “delivery packages”. We also initiated some important ethical conversations with parents, such as how they would react to genetically modified foods and who would benefit and lose from such technologies.

One other special part of the museum exhibit was a large group discussion between scientists and members of the public. We sat together at different roundtables and discussed topics such as “public community labs” and “engineering mosquitos” - speaking with members of the public gave us different perspectives on implementation and perception of these concepts. In particular, the discussion about creating community labs gave us ideas on promoting collaborative mammalian synthetic biology research in shared facilities.

Finally, one of our most important contributions to the “Building with Biology” experience was to shape how the activities are developed. This event was a pilot trial, and will be expanded to over 200 different museums next year! The Museum of Science team was interested in learning more about which activities worked well and which needed improvement. Through our direct feedback forms we shared constructive suggestions on how these activities can be refined for the future. We really hope that our feedback gets implemented, and that the series really changes the way synthetic biology is perceived and discussed in the public.