A German-wide study revealed that 80% of people claim they do not know anything about synthetic biology while at the same time 60% associated a bad feeling with the term. Since a class of Liberal Arts and Sciences students wanted to know more about this subject, we gave a lecture for them. In their second semester of taking economic, social and scientific courses the students had only little life sciences background. To tackle this, we introduced synthetic biology by presenting all the applications in fields of pharmacy, biofuel production and medicine as well as safety issues one has to keep in mind. Moreover, we talked about the iGEM competition itself, raising interest in the collaborative and fun work on our very own synthetic biology project. To show what we are actually working on, we presented a rough overview of our project pointing out its key features and social impact. After our talk the students asked a lot of questions about the iGEM competition, especially what kind of teams are participating or how free the choice of the project topic is. They also showed great interest in our DiaCHIP, in the question of project continuation after the competition and in the possibility to establish a start-up company out of our project.
In summary, we are convinced we could raise their interest in synthetic biology and may inspire them to take part in future iGEM participation.