Team:BIOTEC Dresden/Outreach v2

In our community outreach program we cooperated with a local high school – the St. Benno-Gymnasium Dresden – and invited a group of 13 students aged 11 to 18 to our iGEM lab. We believe this program was beneficial for all involved. For most students this was their first contact to the profession of science. Learning about science in the setting of iGEM is fun and can motivate interested youth to develop their scientific skills. The very least we achieved is to illustrate the importance of proficient communication in English to the global citizen of tomorrow.

We encouraged our visitors to ask any questions they might have. And ask they did. The students showed a remarkable talent to inquire all essential problems of the matter. Explaining our project to them reminded us of the “big picture” and provided us with new perspectives.

It was a long time ago that we visited the biotec, but for me it was really interesting and I remember a lot of the things we saw. It was a very new view on everyday things. What can we build if we go in so little and small parts of an element? Although it impressed me to see the way how you fixed some problems like the gene-timer and stuff like that. I'm really excited to see the future development of your great idea and maybe the first usage of a technology based on your great inventions.

I wish your team a very interesting and successful presentation of your stunning ideas =) Leo Käßner

The biotechnology lab we visited was a really international company. The students who came from Russia, India and other countries were very friendly although they seemed to have to work a lot. They patiently showed and explained to us what they were searching for, and we -silly average pupils- smiled, nodded and tried to understand everything. We did learn that the English language is able to bring people together. Matthias Bellmann

Visiting the science lab offered the rare opportunity to catch a glimpse on the practical application of what is usually dealt with in rather abstract biology lessons. Yet it was striking to see how standard procedures, such as “running a gel” that, due to a lack of facilities, can’t be executed at school, but are frequently talked about, are done. This doesn’t only include having the chance to fiddle around with expensive high-tech devices, but the researchers also made a great effort to break down their project to simple-minded high school students. Although the real-world application of a nano-factory on a chip seems far off to most of us, it is precisely the drive to research without a narrowly-fixed goal that provided an interesting insight into the philosophy of these researchers. Richard Pollack

Fund raising in Leipzig

Like every year of the great event in the field of Biotechnology in the east part of Germany in the state of Saxony, this year in 2009 the Biotechnology Symposium took place in the famous city of Leipzig. On the auspicious day of 26th May 2009 in the BIOCITY Leipzig the symposium had taken place in the presence of eminent scientists all over Germany and also all over the world. The main program had been conducted by Prof. Stewart, Dr. Schäffer, Dr. Beyer, from BIOTEC Technical University of Dresden and Prof. Blessing, Dr. Züchner from BBZ. The symposium mainly aimed at unveiling the curtains of new develpoments of biological research to the mass of the audience listening to the talks of the scientists who were giving talks on varied topics like stem cell therapy in the way of regenaration to microRNA applications in the understanding of cellular signal traffic to biophysical develpoments too.

Surrounding the essence of this great symposium the BIOTEC_Dresden iGEM team had also arrived to reap the wellness of the amazing research and also to popularize themselves among the huge crowd about their novel ideas in building a cell free system with active transcriptional-translational system. Our team has gained a different platform among the crowd of genius people all around. We reached to each and every possible person we met over there and described our ideas which brought us a lot of moral support and economical help through various companies present there and successfully outreach to the people of the world about our very first venture to this great competition on such a eminent venue of the world.