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What can synthetic biology do for us?
Synthetic biology - engineering life with its most fundamental units by using DNA BioBricks and other modularly combinable parts, has a potential beyond scope and can improve the quality of life for everyone and mankind as a whole. The ultimate goal of researchers in synthetic biology is not only the understanding of life itself and how it functions, but applying the acquired knowledge to make a change within their community.
As a first step, we talked to scientists and asked them how their work has influenced their community. Nonetheless, it is of absolute necessity to include the entire society to address the impact of synthetic biology on our society. We decided to do this by organizing a panel discussion evening dedicated to the topic 'Synthetic biology - Bricks for a healthy life?', i.e. synthetic biology in medicine.
However, we wanted to go a step further: Research in general and especially synthetic biology as a very “young” discipline relies on a community, on interaction between researchers and the exchange of ideas and expertise. Therefore, we did not only ask experts and researchers from different fields to join us this evening and distributed flyers and placards to invite the broad society, but also translated the discussion simultaneously from German to English and broadcasted it via a live stream.
Despite the great enhancements synthetic biology can achieve, engineering with building blocks that are so close to the basic principles of life itself comes with a range of ethical questions and security precautions to consider. We see it as our immanent responsibility as iGEM team to address these questions and to take concerns by parts of the society very seriously. Hence, we invited Prof. Dr. Axel Bauer, who has been member of the German ethics council for several years and Dr. Joachim Boldt who works as assessor for the German ethics commitee for ethical implications of synthetic biology. Both of them are highly involved in the field of medical ethics also due to being professor for this subject. In order to thematize the safety concerns, we were very glad to have Dr. Harald König, who works at the Institute for Technology Assessment and System Analysis, as our guest.
Another very close interdependence synthetic biology is linked to is politics and law. Researchers need to obey the juridical boundaries and the legislature has to react to novel developments and find a compromise between many different opinions, some being more conservative, others more progressive. To reflect this interweaving, we additionally invited local politicians, such as Prof. Dr. Nicole Marmé who is member of the city counsil of Heidelberg. Dr. Stephan Brandt, chairman of the department for Biotechnological Innovation, Nanotechnology and Genetic Engineering, works on how laws need to adapt to the most recent findings in synthetic biology and genetics and we are very glad he joined us for this evening. Finally, the topic that stands in the middle of this interconnected topic is, after all, research in synthetic biology. For that reason, we asked Dr. Dirk Grimm, who works on the CRISPR-Cas system and who knows the cutting edge developments to be the scientific representative in the panel.
After a lot of planning, organization and set up of all the required technical equipment (thanks again to Dr. Jens Wagner from the Physics Department), the talk evening could start with a brief introduction to the topic given by Jasmin and Max from our team. As we wanted the main part of the evening to be an open discussion, we deliberately made the introduction very compact. For the remaining 1.5 hours of the evening, Tim navigated our guests, as well as the audience through the discussion.
The involvement of the audience was amazing, proving that this topic is indeed highly interesting to a large part of the society. Most eminently, we were very happy that besides the approximately 100 guests that joined us physically in the BioQuant, we had almost 400 viewers online, among them also other iGEM teams, such as iGEM Team Cambrige (link). Besides watching, our followers on twitter were also very engaged in asking questions that were then addressed by Tim and the invited experts.
The topics discussed ranged from green to red biotechnology and were contemplated in a highly interdisciplinary way (with the focus on medical applications nonetheless). Besides, and in correspondence to the initialization of the “Community lab” track in iGEM, we addressed biohacking and the implications it has on society, the scientific community and the communication between the two entities. Naturally, ethical problems and implications of in vivo and in vitro technologies and what the dreams and wishes of people who are in favor of or critical about synthetic biology are regarding future developments in this field. The question iGEM team Cambridge was posting nicely summarizes the last part of the discussion: “How can synthetic biologists better communicate their research to the public?” This includes the role of politicians and law makers, as well as the responsibility of everyone who is involved in research to put a focus on the outreach and the interaction, not only with the scientific community, but also with the broader public.
So far, many iGEM teams have organized discussion evenings and invited people from the broad society to join an interdisciplinary evening. This approach is great and helps a lot to improve the communication between scientists and the public. Nonetheless, there are still barriers to overcome:
- The interested population of one city is not representing the entire society. Hence, we decided to provide the opportunity to join us online via live stream. This should not be limited to watching the discussion passively, that is why everyone could ask questions via twitter by #askigemheidelberg. These questions were then shown in the discussion, so that our invited guests could reply or reflect on them.
- The lingua franca in research is English, however not everybody is capable of speaking English fluently. Therefore, we deliberately chose German as the language the discussion was held in. This way, everyone who was interested had the possibility to follow. In order to keep the event international and also understandable for those who watched online, we translated the event simultaneously to English.