Team:Uppsala/Communication
Introduction
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. Nelson Mandela
Engaging with the public and our stakeholders has been the cornerstone of our project outside of the lab. Since our project has a wider aim of improving the current food system, we put emphasis on understanding what effect it could have on both the economy and our environment. We have both looked into the benefits of having cultivated meat on the market and also considered what ethical concerns need to be taken into account. Farmer’s integrity has been important to us and we wanted to know how they can be incorporated in the conversation. To efficiently direct this information, we have approached the general public mainly through our social media. To that end, we started the following initiatives:
- Hosted Future Farming webinar
- Hosted joint workshops with iGEM Stockholm on reaching out to stakeholders and considering ethics in our synthetic biology project
- Hosted visits for biotechnology high school students
- Raised awareness and educated about cultivated meat on social media
- Hosted a prototyping event and gave insight into a local innovation biotechnology test hub
- Sent out two surveys: one for the general public and one for farmers
- Hosted a SynBio hour for university students at Uppsala University
Future Farming Webinar
When you educate one person you can change a life, when you educate many you can change the world. Shai Reshef
Our team thought that the best way for us to spread awareness about Cellular Agriculture was by organizing a small conference. The original idea of the Future Farming webinar conference was to highlight current advances in traditional agriculture and introduce new emerging alternative agriculture, such as cellular agriculture. We wanted to connect this topic of discussion to entrepreneurship, science and sustainability. However, an event requiring the gathering of a large number of people in an enclosed space was still surrounded with scepticism at that time due to the ongoing pandemic. Since we were discouraged from seeing each other in real life, we thought that we should make the most out of the experience of an online event. Therefore, the event was brought to a global audience virtually. We managed to create our dream lineup of nine speakers from three different continents, Europe, America and Australia, and an audience from various different time zones.
Webinar Lineup
August 29th, 2021
August 30th, 2021
One great conversation can shift the direction of change forever. Linda Lambert
After a full day of formal presentations followed by Q&A, we provided a platform for both our webinar speakers and attendees to interact in a more informal way. We invited all participants to a new online platform called Sophya, a new emerging virtual world where people can assign an avatar to their persona. We encouraged the continuation of interactions there by communicating through pop-up camera windows, similar to Zoom but more interactive. We had embedded interesting articles and websites in the space and even provided some games as ice breakers for attendees.
Since this platform is relatively new, and most of the webinar participants were unfamiliar with it, a Sophya guide was created by our team with instructions on how to log in and use the software. The number of people that joined us there was just right for interesting conversations to spark. We had informal discussions with people just like we would at regular physical conferences. Later, we even heard that some people received valuable advice for their iGEM projects. This was a platform where some acquaintances even met and elaborated on their shared interest in alternative proteins. We were thrilled about this addition to our webinar structure and had a lot of interesting interactions with the attendees.
SPECIAL THANKS
- All our fabulous speakers, which made it possible to form our dream line up for the webinar
- iGEM MSP for continuous collaboration throughout the summer which motivated us to host this webinar and invite a diverse lineup
- Breanna and Megan at New Harvest for assisting us with hosting a social networking in Sophya and general webinar support and encouragement
- Björn Arvidsson and Fanny Blöm at STUNS biotech for networking support and by connecting us with the Future Foods initiative at SLU
- Aditya Vaze and Panagiotis Vlachogiannis at Alternative protein project at Wageningen for spreading the word on our webinar
- Naropa at Protein report for promoting our webinar
- iGEM Wageningen and iGEM Groningen for presenting their projects to the webinar participants
- Participants that attended Sunday and Monday
PROMOTION
- Protein Report
- Some of our speakers and organizations involved gave our project visibility by sharing information about the respective events, before and after the events took place, on multiple platforms. Examples: Instagram (Abi), LinkedIn (Irfan), Twitter (Tomas), Twitter (Ruth)
81 external people registered for our event, and adding to that, our full team of 19 students attended.
Workshops
- DRIVHUSET Workshop for approaching stakeholders
- SynthEthics Workshop for implementing ethics in synthetic biology
DRIVHUSET Workshop
DRIVHUSET is a local entrepreneurial innovation hub. In collaboration with DRIVHUSET Uppsala, we set up an interactive workshop for both our team and iGEM Stockholm, where we focused on presenting our project to stakeholders. We had a lecture by Erik Tosterud from DRIVHUSET who showed us how using the Lean Canva model can assist us in setting up a pitch for different stakeholders. After a 30 minute brainstorming session within our teams, we pitched our projects to each other.
The workshop was a unique opportunity for our whole team to sit down together under pressure to get a unified idea of our values and direction for the project. Many ideas emerged during the time, so it was helpful to refer back to our notes later in our project. During this restricted time, we were provided a platform to look at the values surrounding our project and debate what we focus on in outward communication involving our project.
We became better equipped when reaching out to stakeholders, discussing with potential sponsors, in presentations and throughout any discussions surrounding our project in general.
- How inefficient it is to only eat the meat of animals, when we need to grow additional parts including the bones, intestines or even wings, feathers and more, that are usually not eaten. From a pure production efficiency standpoint, it would be considered wasted resources. With cultivated meat, we could simply grow the muscle and fat tissue needed for the same experience for the taste buds as well as nutritional value
- How COVID-19 has shown us how zoonotic diseases can spread and cause global pandemics
- That our early adopters would most likely be current meat eaters, especially those advocating for sustainability, that do not see a current solution on the market that satisfied their hunger for meat
- How we would approach farmers differently than other stakeholders, such as the general public open for the idea, cellular agriculture industry members or restaurant chains
SynthEthics Workshop
SynthEthics is a recent start-up that stemmed from former iGEM participants who aim to consider ethical aspects in synthetic biology. In collaboration with iGEM Stockholm, SynthEthics set up an interactive workshop which focused on our two projects specifically and how we could explore ethical aspects within synthetic biology.
The two representatives from SynthEthics, the amazing duo Erik and Blanca, had received detailed information about our project and what ethical concerns we wanted to explore. Different ethical considerations came up during the workshop, some of which we had considered before, but their insight also provided us with new perspectives. Our ethical motivations became clearer, so we left the workshop more determined about what we wanted to focus on in our outreach.
For more details on how we explored the ethical aspect of our project, see our Ethics section.
High School student visits
Under our supervision, the high school students learned some basic microbiological techniques such as how to pipette, streak bacteria, and re-streak for single colonies.
We were happy to collaborate with the department of Biology Education centre, towards approaching our local NTIG high-school - biotechnology students - early in May, introducing them to synthetic biology and the iGEM competition. Later in August we were visited by the same class of students for a full week of a “synthetic biology workshop”. The class had been interested in synthetic biology and iGEM for some time and this visit served to familiarize the students with this field in more detail. During this week, we gave them an elaborate presentation on our project and explained what our team was specifically designing in the laboratory.
During the workshop in August, the usage of chromoproteins for visualising expression systems had served as an education piece for the high school biotechnology students and we were thrilled to be able to integrate such experiments for their laboratory exposure. One of our PIs, Professor Anthony Foster, also gave a lecture on the usage of BioBricks.
For a more practical experience, we helped the students to plan, perform and interpret synthetic biology experiments together with our team members, who tutored the students throughout the process. The students performed transformation of plasmids containing genes from chromoproteins into E. coli cells and later expressed them. We also taught them some basic microbiological techniques such as, how to pipette, streak bacteria, check the colours of the plates next day and restreak for single colonies.
Teacher of the ambitious high school class, Pernilla Berglund (Awarded teacher in biology, chemistry and natural science, NTIG- Upper secondary education in ICT/tech, science, design and business mentor) said the following:
The collaboration between my class and the iGEM Uppsala team 2021 has been valuable in many aspects.
- get an insight into how studies at the university can be executed
- develop a curiosity for synthetic biology
- deepen their scientific approach
- deepen their understanding for possibilities, risks and ethical questions
- develop their ability to perform theoretical and practical work in biology and to communicate using an appropriate scientific language
The pupils in the class are all in a natural science specialization in Biotechnology, year 3. The contact with the iGEM 2021 team and the faculty supporting the team has been a great inspiration. The generous and knowledgeable support by the iGEM students in the laboratory experiments offered a unique possibility to discuss theoretical and practical perspectives of synthetic biology. The iGEM Uppsala 2021 project on cultured meat raised both curiosity, engagement and ethical concerns with the pupils.
The collaboration between the NTI high school and Uppsala University resulted in a new personal network for faculty and students. All parts, lectures, experiments and workshops have been appreciated.
We believe this has given them a much more elaborate view of the possibilities in this field and we believe this workshop as a whole would encourage the students to consider potentially launching a high school iGEM team in the future.
Other Events
Prototyping Event
For any synthetic biology project to maximize its impact in the world it has to be taken from the lab out into the real world. Throughout our research, during the summer, we came into contact with several people within the life-science community with prototyping experience and we decided to give all iGEM teams the opportunity to learn from them by organizing a webinar. Participants got to learn basic prototyping principles from a prototyping expert, received a virtual walkaround at Testa Center, a unique bio-prototyping facility in Uppsala, and heard about the experience of prototyping from a Dutch algae-based startup. We also gave a presentation on our own scale-up efforts planned for the following week.
SynBio hour
SynBio Hour is a lunch event hosted by iGEM Uppsala every year. During the presentation, we introduced iGEM to other university students and also showcased what we have been doing in our project. The event provides a great opportunity to promote iGEM as a unique learning experience and gives others a chance to ask questions and meet with our iGEM team members!
Social Media engagement
Engagement is very effective and immediate through social media. We have mainly focused on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn as social platforms in our public outreach. Our primary educational content has been showcased in a weekly series on our Instagram page known as "Cell-Ag Monday" and "Farmer's Friday", where we discussed a specific topic within cellular agriculture or the farming community for the sake of raising awareness and reaching out in an educative manner.
Cell-Ag Monday
We realised that not many of our followers had previous knowledge about cellular agriculture. In order to spread the word and raise awareness about the field and our research we created a weekly segment called Cell-Ag Monday. Throughout this series we went through different topics regarding cellular agriculture and explained these to educate people about the subject.
Posts were short and straight to the point. They were supposed to reach our followers, no matter the scientific background. Topics varied from introducing cellular agriculture, discussing the many benefits behind the field, the important distinction between plant based meat and cultivated meat, insights into cellular agriculture from a global perspective and we also gave our audience some examples of how startups are appearing across the world and the field is expanding. So far, Singapore is the first and only country to date to allow the commercial production of cultivated meat.
Later in our series, we connected the topics to our project by first highlighting the impact growth factors have on the growth medium and simplifying how we have taken different approaches to enhance the growth factor FGF2. Lastly, we shared how the iGEM Uppsala team feels about cultivated meat and how our opinions about the subject have changed over the course of our project.
Farmers Friday
Our other weekly segment was called Farmers Friday, where we discussed future prospects of farming and possible problems that might arise with the emergence of alternative farming, such as cellular agriculture. We are aware that farmers are in a difficult position. The demand for meat is increasing and industrial agriculture is pressured to make more food efficiently. All while agriculture bears the high burden of feeding the currently largest ever and growing population. You can read more about how we approached this sensitive topic under Inclusivity.
Cellular Agriculture in the news
On our LinkedIn we shared articles that discussed the development in the field of Cellular Agriculture, as well as project updates.
Visibility of our project
With the help of social media and the affordable wide-spreaded network tools, we focused on improving the visibility of our content. We often used platforms like Global iGEM Slack and the Alternative Protein Slack space to highlight some of our initiatives and for collaborations.
By posting content regularly on our social media platforms at hours with maximum traffic we have managed to improve our engagement rate and the number of followers. Some strategies included using personalized hashtags, and presenting our content following a story line.
As a reference, on the Instagram platform, from April until October, our followers had increased from 711 to 939. In addition, the engagement rate improved by 25%. The engagement rate was calculated by making a mean of the statistics rates provided by Instagram for profile visits, impressions, website visits and post interactions. The most common age group for our listeners ranged between 18 to 35 years and they came mostly from Uppsala, Stockholm and New York.
This enabled us to lay out our project content to a higher number of interested people in a simple and efficient way.
Testa Center featured us on their website
See the full article here.
Uppsala University International Student Newsletter feature
Future Farming webinar Event Alert - Protein Report
See the original article here.
New Harvest feature
New Harvest is one of the most esteemed and established cellular agriculture non-profit organizations.
They featured us on their Community Bulletin Board in their October newsletter. Further, they promoted our Future Farming webinar and included our registration link on their Instagram:
New Harvest October Community Bulletin Board
New Harvest provided our registration link on their Instagram
TECHNA feature
TECHNA is the newspaper of UTN (Uppsala teknolog- och naturvetarkår), which is the student union of all the science and engineering programs of Uppsala University. We were interviewed for an article about iGEM and our project in an issue of the TECHNA newspaper. With this we aimto spark an interest in synthetic biology and encourage Uppsala’s science and engineering students to apply for iGEM next year. You can find the article in the 3rd issue for 2021, found here.