Team:TU Delft/Human-practice

From 2010.igem.org

Human Practice

Synthetic Biology is for the whole world

When new technologies are presented to society, the reaction of the public is hard to predict. This is because Synthetic biology raises questions about safety, security and ethics. We tried to tried to analyze the perception, assess the awareness and improve the eductation of the general public about synthetic biology. In order to reach all stakeholders in a organized way, we came up with an approach for our human practice, the EPAC pyramid.

Sub projects

Education

Synthetic biology is hard to grasp for many people. Convinced of the fact that we can communicate synthetic biology in a way that it is understandable for everyone, we set up an education program. We did not only focus on students, or adults, but tried to educate people of all ages with different backgrounds. To reach a broad spectrum of people we organized our education activities in the Science museums NEMO and Science Centre Delft.

Perception

We wanted to adjust our educational program to the knowledge of both the general public and the experts. Through interviews and a literature study, we tried to get a clear picture of the perceptions that live among society. In addition, we organized several discussions fora in collaboration with the Rathenau Institute. In the dialogues we used distinct propositions to trigger the audience to think about future prospects of synthetic biology applications and ethics.

Awareness

Before one can form a opinion about anything, one should first reach a certain level of awareness. To put synthetic biology in the spotlights, we sought ways to stand out in the media. We started to promote our project by the social media like [http://www.facebook.com/pages/TU-Delft-iGEM-team/112242102125963 facebook] and [http://twitter.com/igemtudelft2010 twitter]. Soon followed by interviews on the national news broadcasts, national newspaper and project promotion in an Internet competition to spread our information into the world.