Difference between revisions of "Team:Freiburg/PaP/LAS"

A German-wide study revealed that 80 % of people claim they don’t know anything about synthetic biology while at the same time 60 % associated a bad feeling with the term. A class of Liberal Arts and Sciences students wanted to know more about this subject and asked us to prepare a lecture for them. As second semester students in a study path that includes economic, social and scientific courses they had only little scientific background. To tackle this, we introduced synthetic biology itself naming all the applications in fields of pharmacy, biofuel production, medicine as well as the safety problems one has to keep in mind. But we also presented the iGEM competition itself, arousing 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 the talk 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 elicit their interest in synthetic biology and may inspire them to future iGEM participations.