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.
This was innovative because we were encouraged to consider multiple dimensions of public engagement with science (PES) as described by McCallie et al. (2009). This study emphasizes collaboration and equal contributions of public and scientific opinions regarding institutional policy, and most importantly rejects the common heuristic that superior scientific knowledge confers superior judgment in which initiatives should be pursued and defended within synthetic biology. Team members helped design three different activity modules encompassing microbial diversity, prioritizing applications of synthetic biology, and comparing vaccine advancements achievable through synthetic biology and conventional science.
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