Team:Vilnius-Lithuania/Outreach/Publicity
High school visits
Being the first iGEM team coming from Lithuania, we strongly agreed that it is our interest and responsibility to broaden the prospects of synthetic biology in our country. Most of the people in Lithuania are still afraid of genetically modified organisms and think of it as 'playing God' and experimenting with people. We wanted to introduce our society with the fact that synthetic biology and genetical engineering is not necessarily bad things and that they are mainly used for scientific purposes. Part of this plan was visiting high school students, who might even become interested in the field of synthetic biology or at least trigger some discussions amongst themselves or the parents.
Our team went to see nine different schools (and we plan on visiting another few in the autumn) and talked about what is synthetic biology, what it is used for, what we could do with it to make world a better place and, finally, what is iGEM competition. In fact, students were the ones, who firstly thought about the idea to use our project for curing diseases. We caught-up on this idea and developed it into bigger plan.
We brought up topics such as genetically modified products and their use in our society, that is why our team and high school students discussed advantages and disadvantages related with the science of synthetic biology.
We asked them questions as:
- Do you know what is synthetic biology?
- Do you know what is it used for?
- What do you think about genetically modified organisms in general?
- What do you think about genetically modified food products?
- In what cases, in your opinion, they are good, and in what cases bad?
Initially many of the students agreed that they would not like to buy genetically altered products, especially food. However, after our talk students felt much more confident about genetically modified organisms – more than 60 % of the people we visited said that they will start considering them more wisely and, if the properties of the food are way better (e.g. tomatoes that do not rot or more nutritious rice), they would consider buying it. On the other hand, not all of the students initially thought that GMO food is so bad, and there were, of course, a part of students that would still say 'no' to any GMO food or product, despite if it is of better quality than natural or not.
It is worth noticing that we did not have any intentions to make students believe that all genetic alterations are good and GMO food is always better. One can agree that this field is still under a lot of investigations and scientific researches. Most of the students also said that the main thing, which keeps them a bit afraid of genetically engineered products is the fact, that this kind of science is relatively new, therefore all the experiments are under construction, which makes using GMOs kind of experimental. This is one of the biggest ethical issues of synthetic biology. However, we did intend to start a conversation about using these products in everyday life. Our discussion with the students showed that most of the people lacks the information regarding this topic – during our survey almost 90 % of the applicants said that they would be glad to hear more about that on the news, social media and other information channels.
In addition, our team gave a few examples that students have not known about before, such as insulin or other drugs. Many of them admitted that they lack general knowledge about synthetic biology. More or less amazed by how much we use genetically engineered products without even thinking, students admitted that GMOs can be and are very efficient in everyday life. Of course, there are many important ethical and scientific issues, related with independent usage of GMOs in our society. But what we can do is start talking about them.
We also talked about previous iGEM projects and we gladly noticed that students were really interested. They were especially amazed by the projects like colonising Mars, creating vegan cheese, aiming to cure cancer. During discussion, many students were thrilled by the idea, that we can use bacteria and biotechnology to cure some very serious diseases – such as AIDS, tuberculosis, cancer. They said that this genetical engineering is completely different than the one with food – so if scientists can focus on disease treatment, they definitely should do it.
Finally, we told students our story – how we came to be a team (the first one in our small country), what are we doing and how are we going to achieve our goals. As the matter of fact, we asked them what do they think about our project in the light of those excellent previous iGEM year stories. Most of students thought that we are aiming a very significant problem and that it is rather exceptional that we use synthetic biology to terminate the processes, built up by the same synthetic biology.
From students we got many interesting ideas, where could we use our bacterial system. They were really passionate about the iGEM competition and some of them even considered creating a high school team next year. We, on the other hand, had a lot of fun travelling to and from schools (which were, by the way, all over the country) and talking to young, but very serious and eager generation.