Hosting Critical Conversations

• The Science Museum of Minnesota and Minnewashta Elementary
      We had the excellent opportunity to help shape the innovative initiative facilitated by a National Science Foundation grant. Science museums across the nation were extended the opportunity to develop programming focused on the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. The initiative aimed to stimulate/be a catalyst for community dialogue around a topic at risk for public scorn. Through facilitating new and challenging conversations regarding the simplest (microbial diversity) to potentially most controversial (applied synbio in therapeutics and the environment) aspects of genetic engineering, our team tackled a new mode of connecting the local community to the future implications of synthetic biology and genetic engineering technologies.

• Why are we expressing human Insulin?
      The ability to produce recombinant human Insulin cheaply has long been a lucrative goal. There are millions of people worldwide who are dependent on Insulin derived from production methods that make the product expensive -and further yet- potentially dangerous.Our team thinks that the current production methods for human Insulin are inefficient and can be optimized by being expressed in Pichia pastoris.