Team:Heidelberg/Human Practice/Project Overview

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Revision as of 16:26, 27 October 2008

Human Practice - Science Communication

Synthetic Biology is a very youg and dynamic scientific field. And as most modern scientific fields, synthetic biology offers many chances in solving actual problems. But on the other hand- and we want to communicate that quite clearly here- synthetic biology also comprises risks. The same risks that every modern science entains.

The hypophesis on which our human practices project is based is the follwing:

Science can only work successful and develop useful inventions if it is based on a high level of acceptance in the society.

From the past we learn, that modern bioscience is not always accepted and fully integrated in the public interest. A good examle is the public view on green biotechnolgy in Germany and Europe. Many people in Germany are afraid of eating genetically manipulated food, although most do not even know the difference between genetically manipulated food and normal food. Food is a product getting into direct contact to the human being and to its health. And this human being, as a creature of habit, becomes sceptical towards this new product and the possible risks it could comprise. So far- so good. But a real problem arises when scepsis is in addition linked to nescience about the scientific backround of a certain new product. The combination of nescience and scepsis is the sward of Damocles of every new, upcoming scientific field, such as green biotec once was, because this combination leads in many cases to fear and by that to non-acceptance in the society. And that is what green biotechnology has to battle every single day.
Synthetic biology is up to now too young and far away from undergoing the same problematic change of acceptance that genetic engineering and green biotec underwent in many european countries.

But: There is the risk that the public hears something about artificial cells or biological robots, without any further explanation and become sceptical towards the uprising star in the fields of lifesciences. And that could lead to unsubstantial prejudices and by that to non-accepatance of the modern synthetic biology research area.

Of course, this would lead to a retarding of the advance of synthetic biology and possible to the non-development of many useful inventions.- The aim of our project is to analyze this hypothises and to give proposals and possible solutions on how to prevent an upcoming scepticism in the public. Generally, one can sum our our solution in one sentence: We need to communicate!
Thus we worked on three different levels:

The Essay

At first we developed a concept, how we wanted to enable a good, non-frightening, but honest and informing way of science communication. Read the Essay here

Surveys

We made a survey to investigate the oppinion of scienctists and non-scientists on science communication and synthetic biology- so that we would know where the weaknesses in science communication are. Therefore we surveyed about 100 people from different intellectual and cultural backrounds in the Heidelberg pedestrian area and about 80 scientist (PhD students, post docs and professors) of the BioQuant and the German Cancer Research Center. That gave us the starting point of our practical work.

Here you can find additional information and the evaluation of the public survey and the evaltuation of the scientist- survey.

We also had the great opportunity to get to know the opinion of a Nobel Prize winner about science communication. This year's Nobel prize winner in Medicine, Prof. zur Hausen, kindly gave us an interview on this topic!

Information, Honesty and close Contact to the public

Third, and that was the most important part of the project, we wanted to practice a way of science communication based on our antecedent research and theoretical work, which would at the end lead to a close contact and a close commutation between our scientific work on the iGEM project and the public. The three bases of science communication are in our opinon:

Information, Honesty and close Contact.

Thus we used different communication approaches to get a broad contact and to reach people from different intellectual and age-related backround.

Media Work

To realise that we had a close collaboration with one of the most well-known newspapers in Germany: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In addition we had close contact to the TV stations Campus-TV Heidelberg and Prometheus TV as well as good contact to the DKFZ institute press. Furthermore the radio station Ruperto Carola and the DKFZ, BioQuant and University Press-Devisions wrote articles concerning synthetic biology, our iGEM Team and the ongoing project work.

Besides the contact to the press we tried to get into direct contact with people by performing the public survey and thereby informing on synthetic biology in a very personal and direct way.

Open Day

Additionally, we organized an Open Day where we invited pubils from different schools and introduced them theoretically and practically in the world of biobricks and synthetic biology. You can find an instruction for an open day as well as a report on our open day.

Phips the Phage Portal

Last, but not at all least, we constructed a portal on the wiki called Phips the Phage where we present our project and synthetic biology in general to interested people without a deep biological background-knowledge. The idea of this portal is to develop a virtual guide (Phips) who guides the public through our Project and adds relevant information every time when necessary- so even pupils should be able to understand what we did during the summer.

With Phips the Phage, the iGEM wiki for the first time served as a platform to provide background information on synthetic biology and not only the scientific details. The concept we follow with this approach is not very frequently practiced, you could call it risky, we prefer to call it bold:

We aim to integrate the information for non-scientists into the information for scientists, because we do not want to seperate the public from our research - not even from the documentation of our research. But since we know that most of the scientific details will not be understood by non-scientists, we have to provide background information. We organized the arrangement of this information in way that somebody who is interested in reading our project descripton, but does not understand everything at first, can directly follow the links to the Phips the Phage page and can find the information he/she needs to understand most of the scientific part. So the optimal way of using our internet portal would be from scientific information to background information and back to scientific information again - now with the chance to really understand the documentation of our project. We can not say it enough times: Only with a profound understanding somebody can build his/her own opinion. And this is what we want to enable interested non-scientists to do. Therefore, in our opinion, it is not enough to give them some information clearly put together for non-scientists. Because as we said, we want to be honest. And one can get the best and purest impression of our scientific work in directly reading the documentation of it. Of course, everybody is free to pick the information he/she is interested in from the one we provide - but at least we want to give everybody the chance to get as much and as pure and honest information as possible.

The Phips the Phage Portal is divided into three sections:
- ... follow Phips to the general background information
- ... follow Phips to the tecnical background information
- ... follow Phips to the project details

We already tested the portal on the opening day and got very postive feed-back from the pupils. You can follow-up the Phips the Phage guiding tour ... follow Phips (step 1)

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