Team:UZurich/Communication

Science Communication & Education

Introduction

Education and public outreach is a very important part of our project. Our goal is to introduce people to the field of synthetic biology and to educate them about the problems of synthetic pesticides.
This is why we organized a tour to the Federal Research Institute of Agricultural Research, where we learned about field trials with GEO plants and biosecurity research. We also organized an entertaining evening where we discussed the ethics behind synthetic biology and GEOs with people from various educational backgrounds. We realized that many people were interested in the research we are doing in our iGEM project but lacked fundamental understanding of the topic. This is why we wrote a handbook. It analyses the politics, ethics and laws behind GEO regulations and agriculture in Switzerland as well as the European Union.
Furthermore, we launched a video series “OMG OMVs!”, where we interviewed farmers, politicians as well as scientists from all over Switzerland. We covered the linguistic diversity of our home country by interviewing farmers in French, German, Italian and Swiss German.
We also visited several high schools and invited a school class to our university for a workshop. They were introduced to scientific work and got to work with the same plasmids we are using in our own experiments.
In order to make a layperson understand our project too, we illustrated a simplified description of our project, explaining the basic concept behind it.

By now, the projects we realized are:

Excursion to the Federal Research Institute Agroscope

Agroscope is the national Swiss Centre of Excellence for Agricultural Research, where highly controlled field trials with genetically engineered organisms are allowed to take place.
On September 14, we invited students from the Swiss Study Foundation to join us on a Peer Event. The students who participated came from diverse fields of study and have never heard of a project like ours.

First, Anna from our team held a presentation introducing the field of Synthetic Biology and our project. She explained what Gene Drives are, how plant immunity works and talked about the annual iGEM competition.


After the keynote, a lot of questions concerning our agriculture and our philosophy of dealing with pests were raised, for example:

  • Are we allowed to do research on dangerous things, like Population Replacement strategies?
  • Should we allow GEOs in Swiss agriculture?
  • Is genetic engineering or synthetic biology even the best path for a sustainable agriculture?


After the presentation, we walked to the research site and visited the Protected Site with genetically engineered corn. We learned that due to a vandalism act several years ago, the field trials now need protection with barbed wire fences and guard dogs (it seems a bit ironic that plants need protection from humans, and not vice versa, even though the narrative is that GEOs are dangerous to us humans...). We also heard about biosecurity research, i.e., how genetic engineering can lead to changes in the ecosystem or even affect the fertility of certain insects. It is very important that we understand the consequences of new (synthetic biology) projects to a complex ecosystem.


In the end, we had an apero with the scientists and we even drank some Agroscope wine (produced by the institute!).
It was a very extraordinary opportunity for us to be able to visit the Agroscope institute. It is not open to the public and in particular the Protected Site is, as the name already puts it, very protected. Many students told us how impressed they were by the research done, especially since most of them had never before heard of Swiss plant breeding projects or genetically engineered leaf rust resistance.

Pizza, Philosophy and Pesticides

In June 2021, Switzerland voted on the popular initiative “For a Switzerland without Synthetic Pesticides”. This initiative caused a lot of discussions about our agriculture.
Additionally, in Switzerland, the commercial cultivation of genetically engineered organisms is currently banned and a reevaluation of this ban will only be done in 2025.
Our iGEM-project BOOM V falls exactly between these two hot topics.

This is why we wanted to open the debate about pesticide use and genetic engineering in the context of synthetic biology. For this, we launched a collaboration with the Swiss think tank reatch. Reatch means “research - think - change”, and aims to promote the contact between society and research.
We promoted our event and invited the participants to pizzas and drinks because we wanted to make it available to everyone interested.


We also invited Prof. Beat Keller as a plant biologist to give an input about the issues of genetic engineering.
On September 22, 42 interested people came together in the beautiful Botanical Garden. Prof. Keller talked about the narrative in Switzerland which makes big differences between “natural” products and “artificial” ones, i.e. genetically engineered products, and how this distinction may not be so clear from a scientific point of view.



After his input, five of our team members each led one discussion group, covering various questions such as:

  • In Switzerland, medical products are exempt from the GEO ban, in comparison to food. Does it make a difference if we use genetic engineering for medicine or for food?
  • Are we allowed to breed anything we like? What about an organism’s dignity?
  • Are we morally obliged to cultivate GEOs which could yield bigger harvests? Or can we just increase our imports when we need more food?
  • Is it appropriate to apply the precautionary principle as a means to prohibit GEOs, as it is happening in Switzerland?








We planned to discuss for one hour, but many people stayed longer. This was very impressive and we were happy to see this, because it showed us that the participants wanted to talk about these questions and about the topics of genetic engineering, our agriculture and how we should deal with these problems.

Pesticides and Genetically Engineered Organisms in Switzerland– Our Handbook

The people we have met in our outreach efforts seemed very interested in the topics of synthetic pesticides, genetically engineered organisms (GEOs) and student projects like ours. Even though we originally intended to do these events for 20-25 students, at both events, more than 35 people participated and actively engaged in the discussions. But we realized that most people lacked a fundamental understanding of the situation. Among the questions we deemed important to understand were the following:

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Our goal is to give a good and compact overview on these complex and big topics, trying to draw a picture on how we came here. Inspired by the 2017 iGEM team from the Israel Technion with their Ethics Handbook, we decided to follow this idea and publish our own booklet, too.

OMG OMVs! - Our Video Series

Science should be accessible and understandable, so we decided to make a video series! Switzerland is a linguistically very diverse country, and so we decided to have our interviews in German, Italian, Swiss German as well as French. In order for everyone to understand them, we subtitled them in English. Check out the entire video series on our youtube channel: iGEM UZurich! Altogether, more than 400 people have watched our videos by now, and we are proud to say that more than 630 accounts follow our research.

J.-D. Perrochet

Pesticides, Pinot Noir and Politics

Episode 1

The intention of researching a substitute for synthetic pesticides originated from the increasing aversion towards these kinds of products, which are harmful to human health and biodiversity. In Switzerland this opposition manifested itself in two initiatives that were voted on in June 2021: “For Clean Drinking Water and Healthy Food” and “For a Switzerland without Synthetic Pesticides”.
It was therefore a natural consequence to look for a farmer who was particularly involved in the issue for our first interview: the initiator of this initiative, winegrower Jean-Denis Perrochet. He explained to us his motivation to launch the initiative and that a crucial goal in our agriculture is to revive our soils.

Rudy Studer

Beetles, Borders and Bacteria

Episode 2

After hearing one bell about synthetic pesticides, it was time to hear the other side. So we started looking for farmers who continue to use traditional methods in their fields, and this time we ended up in Ticino: the southernmost canton in Switzerland. This is the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, therefore not only linguistically but also morphologically and culturally different.
Rudy Studer is owner of a small winery in Novazzano, just a few hundred metres from the Italian border. Whereas our first interviewee, Jean-Denis Perrochet, came from a long dynasty of wine growers, Rudy Studer told us how he became a wine grower: “I don’t come from a peasant family. After finishing secondary school, I went to the agricultural school. After that, I took over this vineyard because it’s easier to handle. I’m doing all of the work by myself.”

Beat Keller

Research, Regulations and Resistance

Episode 3

This time, Raphael made an interview with Prof. Beat Keller. Prof. Keller is a plant biologist and specializes in phytopathology (plant diseases) at the University of Zurich. And of course, when talking about pesticide use and combating pathogens, we needed to talk with him: He’s an expert who really knows how plant immunity and their genetics work. He’s been doing research on the leaf rust resistance gene Lr34 for many years now and is a member of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, which “supports policy-making, administration and business with expert knowledge and actively participates in public discourse”.

Roberto Mozzini

Greenhouses, Growth and G...Tomatoes

Episode 4

Roberto Mozzini produces tomatoes and many different fruits with a technology called hors-sol. Hors-sol means that the fruit doesn’t grow in the soil anymore, but rather in a greenhouse with nutrient fibers. Mozzini believes that with increasing extreme climate conditions, his cultivation method will prevail in the future.
Before we entered the part of the greenhouse where his tomatoes grew, we had to disinfect our feet and hands. This was not unusual to us, since we’ve also lived through the Covid-19-pandemic, but Mozzini explained us the real reason for this: If a nematode or virus comes into the greenhouse, a big part of his harvest is endangered for there is a continuous water cycle connecting all of the plants.
This reminded us of flavoflow, the iGEM project from Vilnius University (Lithuania) in 2020. This team addressed a problem similar to this: They developed a warning program to the big fish tanks in fish production facilities because there too, the water is a cycle and potential viruses, bacteria or nematodes can spread very easily.

Ruedi Noser

Ständerat, Self-Sufficiency and Start-Ups

Episode 5

In order to understand our ban on the cultivation of genetically engineered organisms, we need to understand how politics work: “Politics is inherently conservative. It is only a reaction to developments in society.”
According to Council of States Ruedi Noser, this is the problem in Swiss agricultural politics: “Switzerland is globally one of the most important research locations. But by simply banning a whole technology, we will face big problems when it comes to food security in the future.” He illustrates the consequences of our regulations with the sale of Syngenta, formerly a Swiss company, to a Chinese corporation. In China, it would be much easier to make field trials with genetically engineered organisms.
Council of States Noser, who is also an entrepreneur, sees big potential in our iGEM project: “If your project works, you will have huge opportunities.”

Daniel Amgarten

Investing, Improvement and Industry

Episode 6

We have seen our project from many perspectives: from the lab, to the field, to politics. But what about the practical economical aspect? For this we talked with Daniel Amgarten, management assistant for Max Schwarz AG, with which we are also partnering. Max Schwarz AG is a Swiss company in the production of vegetables that uses both conventional and organic cultivation methods.

Daniel Amgarten doesn’t think that gene technology will have a chance in the near future, except maybe for more precise techniques like CRISPR/Cas9, indeed he said that with it “I do see the possibility that this could be possibly implemented in Switzerland, from a judicial perspective.” In regards to our project his opinion was positive and he underlined how it “will probably later be an interesting application in plant and vegetable production.”

Paul Scherer

Discussions, Dilemmas and Data

Episode 7

How do you even make sure you analyse the right parts when looking for potential risks? That is one of the key take-aways from our interview with Paul Scherer, CEO of the SAG (Schweizer Allianz Gentechfrei).

Having studied agronomy, Paul Scherer has been involved in the future and sustainability of agriculture for decades now. And he not only sees an issue with the current use of pesticides, he lives it too: “I only buy organic products, which shows that I believe the pesticide pollution is too high.”
For him it’s clear that the discussion around the moratorium in Switzerland has long become a debate, and that in his experience, the big problem is that people with opposing views don’t meet.

Pascale Flury

Plants, Pathology and Prevention

Episode 8

„In the next decades, we will face the biodiversity as well as the climate crises, and in both, agriculture is both a driver and a victim of these changes.“

Dr. Pascale Flury is a phytopathology expert at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL in Switzerland. Her research focuses on plant diseases and encompasses everything from basic research up to application methods. „We are trying to prevent the plants from becoming sick, instead of only reacting to a certain pathogen. We’re trying to find out under which circumstances and at which times pathogens become dangerous - such that we can tackle the problem in advance.“

For organic agriculture, a project like BOOM V which makes use of genetically modified organisms wouldn’t be an option, since organic agriculture doesn’t allow the application of living GMOs nor parts thereof.

High Schools

In the framework of the Human Practices domain we have been given the opportunity to present at various high schools all over Switzerland. It was important to us to reach young people to attract their interest in synthetic biology. Covering the linguistic diversity of Switzerland, we held presentations in Ticino in Italian, in Zurich in English for a bilingual class, and in Zug in German.

High School Presentation

We used this time to give the students an introduction to synthetic biology. We focused on exciting projects and future possibilities to trigger their interest in the topic. To keep our lessons as interactive as possible we included a game-like quiz.

Furthermore, we talked about our own project and obtained students' feedback. They were very curious, but also critical concerning possible implementations and their consequences. One student observed the similarity of our project with vaccinations: And indeed, we are basically boosting a plant’s immune system before a pathogen will attack.
Ethical discussions about the general handling of GMOs were exciting. Particularly the gene-drive method triggered a lively exchange of controversial opinions. Students gained an insight on how to get into the field of synthetic biology. Most importantly we explained to them that they can apply such revolutionary methods of synthetic biology already during their bachelor studies. Participation in an iGEM project is an ideal way to get there.
Teachers were very satisfied with our work and already said that they want to book us for future classes.


Workshop

The benefit for students attending our workshop was far beyond our classroom presentations. We invited a class of 19 students to the Life Science Center at the University of Zurich. Together we performed a series of experiments which are pivotal for many laboratory tasks: Restriction digestion & Gel electrophoresis. We provided plasmids from our laboratory which gave the students the unique opportunity to work on real steps of our own project. Thanks to this approach, they could really understand the meaning behind the experiments.
Furthermore, we provided them with a set of exercises which they had to solve during the course of the half day. In high school, the students have been made familiar with the basics of DNA science but never had the opportunity to work with it in a practical way.

In the workshop, they were faced with the challenge of careful handling of DNA, restriction enzymes and accurate pipetting, whereby we were always there to help. Finally, we provided them with sufficient knowledge to autonomously evaluate the results of the gel electrophoresis.

Credit for organizing our workshop goes to our advisor Timothy Kurer. He was in close contact with the Life Science Learning Center of our university and helped us with the planning and execution of the event.







Social Media outreach

To reach as broad an audience as possible, we have made our content available on our instagram @igem_uzh, our youtube channel iGEM UZurich as well as on our LinkedIn account.

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