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Policy practices

Matching days -

Introducing new students to synthetic biology

To approach the next generation of chemical biologists, we presented about iGEM on the matchings-days of the Technical University Eindhoven (TU/e). Therefore we prepared a talk about first of all synthetic biology, but also about what the iGEM-competition encompasses. We presented several projects that have been done in the iGEM-competition the last couple of years (Groningen 2012, Münich 2013 and Wageningen 2014). Also we introduced them to last year’s project of the TU/e and described to them how we will take this project as a starting point for our own project.

Ethics forms an important aspect of our project and therefore we encouraged the students to take part in a discussion about the use of GMOs in the human body. Therefore we posed them several questions, for example: ‘Should it be possible to tamper life, with the help of synthetic biology?’, ‘Would you like to have a GMO in your body, if it’s for a good purpose?’ and ‘Would you mind if a GMO gets into the environment?’. The students had to respond to these questions with red or green cards. After every question we asked if they could argue their choice and discussed these arguments with each other.
The days were successful and it was nice to hear the ideas and arguments from future students.