Team:Fudan/Practices
Our team really works hard to contribute to the popularization of science! Inspired by one of the major incident in the debating of transgenic technology in China, our team hold six successful lecture in our university to share the basic knowledge of different areas of biology. All of these lectures are delivered by the major experts in these areas and this event has been the most influential series of lectures held by Chinese iGEM team.
This all comes from the shock that students in our university, who are supposed to be the most educated and intelligent students in China, lack the basic ideas about transgenic technology. We are still not satisfied with our achievements on the campus, we search places outside our university to make more difference. We work hard to get the chance to give a speech to all the students in a high school; we explain the simple principle of transgenic food to the passengers and hand out leaflets on the street; we introduced our project to visitors in Shanghai Science&Technology Museum.
We cannot list all the efforts we made to get involved into this big issue, but we can prove our sincerity to make a difference!
(See: https://2015.igem.org/Team:Fudan/Pracitices)
I am fudan team leader Jiang Xilin, and I will show you our efforts for a small topic.
It all starts from a lecture in our university, March 26th. In that lecture, the famous journalist Cui Yongyuan had a quarrel with one of our professor about the transgenic technology. In that lecture, the journalist give the famous saying:”You don’t have the right to debate over transgenic with me if you know noting about journalism.”
However, Cui influence the audience with his eloquence and convince most of the students that transgenic technology is the curse of human beings. This famous debate invoke a nation-wide discussion over the rationality of transgenic technology, and for biology major students like me, we shocked by the fact that most students in our university lack the basic knowledge of biology and can be easily misleading. We used to think the popularization of science should be mainly to the old ladies or the web user with low education level, however, this time we find that students from our university, who are supposed to be the most educated and most intelligent students in China, also need that knowledge.
So we begin to change our aim, we believe influencing those around us should be the first step to influence more people. To get more people involve in the change made by synthetic biology, we believe we first need to eliminate people’s bias in trans genic technology. The most efficient way is to hold high quality lecture and involve more students. We held six lectures of different experts, which have involved more than 500 audience.
We are still not satisfied with our achievements on the campus, we search places outside our university to make more difference. We work hard to get the chance to give a speech to all the students in a high school, and we invite students interested in biology to attend a special experiment course in our university.
We are also pleased to be invited to an events hold in Shanghai Science&Technology Museum. We introduced our project to visitors in Shanghai Science&Technology Museum. And we attended the iGEM Asia conference held by NCTU.
Besides, we also have activity on the streets. We explained the simple principle of transgenic food to the passengers and hand out leaflets on the street.
In order to use synthetic biology to change this world, we should first let world accept the idea of synthetic biology. We believe the first step is to eliminate people’s bias of transgenic technology, and we are working really hard on this issue.
And all this work are organized by an Bertalanffy Association which belong to our iGEM team.
BERTALANFFY
Unfortunately we do not have any specific research group focusing on synthetic biology in Fudan. Three years ago, We founded Bertalanffy Association only to serve iGEM. Students who are interested in iGEM came from different departments and gathered in the association. This year we still did the same things, but meanwhile we established a new image for BA. We want it to become Fudan’s leading organization of public educating in life science. We started from catching eyes.
Due to the limitation of science background and competition requirements, many students in Fudan did not even know Bertalanffy. This year we grabbed every chance and participated actively in big events. We became known by many after the Fudan 110 birthday due to a set of photos we presented to our home school. We organized orientation in our Dream Lab so that students from other areas could understand what we were cooking in that mysterious room. We launched a set of lectures on leading edges in biological study. We put great effort in the educating of GMOs, which you will see more in details in the next section.
Image 1. Participation in the Grand Celebration of Fudan 110 Birthday
Image 2. Dream lab Orientation
The effect was fantastic. At the beginning of this Fall Semester, We’ve already recruited more than 100 students, which is more than all the former iGEMers in Fudan combined. For those who want to join the iGEM team next year, we offered consultancies and trainings. Many of them are not majoring in science or technology, but they got a chance to examine this area and was captured. They will from now on help with all the collaborations and human practices. This is the start of general awareness. We believe we will grow even stronger to let iGEM BE FAMOUS, to let science BE APPRECIATED.
Image 3. Successful Recruiting in Freshmen
Image 4. Future iGEMers