Team:Yonsei Korea/Education
Human Practices
Centered On:
Connection
Community
Cooperation
The Yonsei team is a novice in iGEM. Our whole journey beginning with the registration process and up until now has been a roller coaster ride. Taking the initiative to start a new opportunity in a place where almost everyone is unaware of the world wide synthetic biology competition was very challenging. Our challenging moments were not only about finding research advisors and funding opportunities but also trying to transform the school ecosystem into the one that embraces search for new opportunities such as iGEM. To accomplish this we employed several approaches to propagate the ideas behind synthetic biology as well as iGEM within the school environment and beyond.
One of the most accessible tools that would allow us to spread the word was the establishment of our solid presence on the internet. We created our own Instagram page and started sharing our daily journey with fellow iGEMers and local people. This was the best medium that granted us the opportunity to quickly inform people about the hurdles we tackled and progresses we made. We believe that we were able to convey the main purpose of iGEM and synthetic biology research.
Even though social media gave us unrestricted access to a broad range of audience to spread the message about synthetic biology, it was inadequate in accomplishing effective scientific communication. The large size of the audience was the primary barrier to creating effective scientific communication that would inspire people to become involved in synthetic biology related research and intellectual contests such as iGEM. However, we had a very ambitious goal. We aimed at inspiring people to gain knowledge in the new field and take up new challenges. To achieve this, we needed to start small. Being the pioneers of participating in iGEM and representing our university, we decided to focus on the school community, specifically students studying science majors. We believed that direct engagement with the audience would reinforce our previous efforts in achieving our ultimate goal. Hence, we all agreed to give a presentation.
Prior to having a direct interaction with our fellow students, we set two main objectives:
1. To explain what synthetic biology is and how it could be applied.
2. To spread the word about iGEM and its roller coaster journey.
To accomplish these objectives, we wanted to understand our target audience better, so we can produce the educational material in accordance with their needs. On that account, we conducted a pre-presentation survey on students' understanding of synthetic biology and its applications. We designed the survey in such a way that it would give us basic yet invaluable information about students’ awareness, full understanding and definition of synthetic biology, and their sources of information about it.
Almost half of our students never heard about synthetic biology, and their major source of information was social media platforms and news outlets compared to science related courses, conferences or research articles. This suggested that reading complicated scientific texts or articles would not be effective in easy understanding of this new concept, so students would mainly rely on gaining a short description of it through social media tools or recent news. However, these were not effective in fully explaining the synthetic biology principles since our survey results substantiated this point:
Only 1% of the total participants (111 students) was very much familiar with synthetic biology, but the vast majority of them did not fully comprehend it. Additionally, we asked students to define synthetic biology, and we observed the same pattern: more than half of them either did not know or could not define it correctly. Overall, survey results motivated us to create a presentation that would balance the complexity and simplicity of science behind synthetic biology, so everyone could enhance their understanding of it and gain new perspectives.
Based on these results we explained the core principles of synthetic biology and its difference from other concepts such as genetic engineering/genome editing. Moreover, we showed how synthetic biology can be employed to solve issues of various sectors and demonstrated our iGEM research categorized in the Food & Nutrition track. The full presentation in pdf format can be found here.
Not only did we plan to explain synthetic biology concepts but also we aspired to spark our fellow students’ curiosity to seek and seize opportunities such as iGEM. Therefore, we shared our whole journey from the beginning of May up until October in a very engaging way. Sharing our journey with major setbacks and achievements definitely challenged their attitude regarding research and the significance of stubbornness. We also covered various aspects of the competition (Human Practices, wiki page, etc.) to illustrate why research should not be only defined by the bench work.
To evaluate our contribution to devising educational tools that assist students’ easy understanding of this interdisciplinary field, we carried out the post-presentation survey. Here, initial 3 questions were aimed at assessing their newly acquired knowledge of the field. We were glad to see how our colleagues became more knowledgeable about the distinction between synthetic biology and genetic engineering techniques. To the question “Which of the following is a synthetic biology organism?” Nearly two thirds of the respondents could distinguish the organism engineered based on synthetic biology principles from the one that received simple modifications in its genome.
iGEM is the complete embodiment of the challenging scientific journey. And we shared our real iGEM story with undergraduate students who were planning to pursue a career in science. We communicated everything we experienced during the process. We shared with our audience how we started, how we found advisors, how we arranged a plethora of meetings with biotech startups and organizations to get the financial support, how we managed to get the lab space under the COVID-19 rules and other circumstances. This way we wanted to show them to gain this experience as early as undergraduates. We believe our iGEM story motivated our colleagues to be open to new opportunities despite the uncertain moments.
Here is the short video of our presentation to more than 100 students.
Once we completed the pre-presentation survey, the responses to one of our questions struck our attention. The question was about the applications of synthetic biology in various areas. We asked them to select multiple options where synthetic biology could be employed to alleviate the current challenges of the listed sectors. Interestingly, respondents selected the options that were already commonly known such as environment, food industry and diagnostics. However, most of them did not select options as energy or manufacturing industries. This indicated that students were still unaware of the magnitude of synthetic biology in resolving the issues humanity faces today.
This prompted us to think about new ways we could create to spread awareness of the power of synthetic biology. Since our presentation provided students with a detailed explanation of the core concepts as well as an example of how synthetic biology could be utilized in Food & Nutrition related issues, we wanted to give students more specific cases. We thought, wouldn't it be amazing if a student majoring in environmental sciences could read this book, learn a new concept, look for colleagues from other biology or any other department and try to create something novel?
Hence, we designed the handbook that demonstrated the various synthetic biology applications, particularly in the environment, energy and manufacturing sectors. It is a very concise, informative and easy to read book that students from any levels and backgrounds can use to gain new perspectives. Furthermore, we provided a list of laboratories in South Korea that focus on synthetic biology, so they could intern in one of them during their summer/winter breaks and further expand their knowledge.
Yonsei_Korea is a convergent team of students based in Seoul, South Korea striving to create meaningful change utilizing synthtic biology in the iGEM 2021 Competition.