Outreach

Learning about synthetic biology

To raise awareness about synthetic biology as well as promote iGEM as a competition, various lectures were held by our Uppsala team for students and professors at Uppsala university. Two of the lectures were scheduled for biotechnology students but was open for other students as well. A third lecture was held for professors at the university. During the hour-long lectures synthetic biology as a field of science was presented. Important aspects such as the potential of synthetic biology were discussed. It is followed by a explanation about iGEM as a competition and the history of the Uppsala team. The lecture also serves as a way to inspire students to join the iGEM community.

Newspapers

Despite being a rather big issue, the fact that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) cause cancer is not very well known to the general public. When ingested, PAHs can cause different stomach cancers and when inhaled it can cause lung cancer of different degrees. According to our survey the majority of the participants are aware of the benefits synthetic biology can contribute with and 53% even have a positive opinion about usages outside of the laboratory. We thought this was a perfect time to contact news papers with our newly acquired information.

iGEM Uppsala wanted to raise an awareness of PAHs and also promote the benefits with synthetic biology as a solution. We contacted different news papers and were published in the following:

UNT
ERGO
SciLifeLab

Bi-Lagan

Bladet

YouTube

This year we wanted to continue adding videos to the Uppsala iGEM youtube channel to hopefully spread the interest in synthetic biology in an easy and fun way. Youtube is a great tool to reach a bigger crowd and for people who do not know about this specific field of science, videos can be the perfect introduction. Of course we also hope to be able to further advertise our team and our project with the launching of the videos. This summer we have made one video about our project and how a summer in the lab can turn out. For all ambitious students competing in the iGEM competition we have also made a video about the dreaded wiki freeze and all the hard work the days before.

The Nordic meetup we organized together with Stockholms iGEM team this summer have been summarized into a movie to inspire future teams to make this into a tradition.