Team:EPF-Lausanne/Social overview

Overview

Aim of the project

The aim of this part of the project is to communicate about the research done by the EPFL iGEM team, in the context of synthetic biology. The major challenge here is to overcome the existing gap between scientific research and how the general public sees and interprets it. Indeed, we observed that many people are afraid of the words cloning, GMO, or biotechnology, and this without them knowing exactly what they stand for. There seems to be a communication problem between scientists and the people from other fields, and this is reflected for example in votation results here in Switzerland. Our aim is not to convince that scientific research in Life Sciences is harmless, but we want to inform the public, to enable them to form their own opinion on the subject.

How to do it ?

The first part of the project consisted in talking with different people, to understand what they think, fear and know about synthetic biology. To achieve this we conducted a survey and when to some high schools to talk to young students. Another aspect of our human practices project is to inform people about what we are doing and what iGEM is about. This was done mainly through interviews and articles in some newspapers. We are also gave several talks, as well to scientists as to the general public.

Human Practices explore how synthetic biology meets issues in safety, security, health, and ethics through the design of novel engineered constructs. This field also studies the repercussions that advances in synthetic biology might have on economy, politics, and culture.

The following sections will give you an overview of the initiatives that have been undertaken by our team to try to answer some of the questions raised above.

Our project is divided into 3 parts :

Talks

Survey

Media