As the human practices part of Southampton’s entry to iGEM 2009 we have looked at the issue of science communication. Continuing work done by team Heidelberg in 2008 we saw that good communication is essential for people outside of the scientific community to make good decisions. Sensationalism can do unnecessary permanent damage to perfectly good science.

We decided to approach this from 3 angles:

• An outreach event will be run for school age children on the basis that if they are educated from early on they will not get swept up by media attention. We hope this event will become a mainstay of Southampton University’s outreach program in the future.
  

• A light hearted video detailing our iGEM experience will be created to encourage people new to the competition and hopefully help them avoid some of the pitfalls that we found ourselves in.
  

• The third angle is to contact local members of parliament and find out their views and how they represent their constituents on the issue of synthetic biology.