Human Practices

Common perceptions of synthetic biology are misguided in the general, nonscientific population. People often consider synthetic biology practices as tampering with God’s work. Additionally, the fear that dangerous bioweapons will result from such research is not uncommon. As students of the field, we believe it was important to alleviate these fears and educate the public. Synthetic biology will succeed when these fears are eliminated and the general population understands that the promises of the field are great and these fears are unjustified. As members of the Cornell iGEM team and undergraduate students in related disciplines, we believed that participation in outreach programs was important achieving these goals. Over the summer CUGEM participated in the Marie Curie program as well as a high school teacher education program. The Marie Curie program is aimed at exposing bright, female high school students to various scientific fields. Our participation involved instructing them on recombination techniques and gel electrophoresis. The students had hands on experience setting up and running given DNA gels. For high school teachers, the experience was similar but more in depth. Teachers were instructed on how to use ApE, plasmid editor software, to design a certain plasmid. The teachers then ran the plasmid on a gel and compared results to what was expected as determined by the program. Many teachers were successful in achieving the desired gel results. We firmly believe in the value of outreach programs that educate the community about the benefits of synthetic biology. Only by achieving public acceptance and support of synthetic biology will the science ascend to its true potential.