by Janet Standeven, advisor to the Lambert_GA team, and a member of Human Practices Committee

Janet Standeven also gave a session on this topic at iGEM’s 2020 Giant Jamboree (iGEM Video Universe)

Do you remember the first time you ran a successful PCR? Was it in the last few months? The last few years? Or so long ago you don’t want to admit it? For high school students, that first successful PCR might have resulted on work from this year’s iGEM project. Let that sink in for a minute…

High school students often make the leap from learning about the central dogma to Gibson assembly in just a few months. And then they go on to transform their world. In this post, I’d like to reflect on the past, to celebrate current successes, to highlight the importance of, and to help us look forward to, the future of High School iGEM.

History of High School iGEM

High School iGEM held its’ first Jamboree in 2011. There were just 5 teams, all from the single state of Indiana. For several years, High School iGEM was held as a separate competition, and eventually moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Boston.

My team first competed virtually in 2013, and in person in 2014. I remember very clearly at that 2014 Jamboree that iGEM was considering having to cut the high school program because of a shortage in resources. Several of we advisors were devastated by that news, and so we lobbied and volunteered our time to help iGEM headquarters give us a trial year to be included in the larger Giant Jamboree.

High School iGEM_Image 1_Through the Years.png

The high school division competed in the 2015 Jamboree. There were 35 high school teams that year. The Taipai American School won the Grand Prize, and was the first high school team to have the honor to stand on the big stage and present with the collegiate finalists in front of the whole crowd of 3000+. It is safe to say that their project was a demonstration to the whole iGEM community that high school students could produce great work and deserved to be included.

High School iGEM in 2020

So now let’s fast forward to 2020. Even in a global pandemic, we had 66 high school iGEM teams from around the world representing 10 different countries. The work that is represented in 2020 is truly remarkable given the effect of pandemics on schools. Some teams had little to no access to a lab, and yet they presented powerful projects, including solutions for nutrient sensing, pre-eclampsia, and cocaine pollution. Some teams had the ability to work in labs for many months, and were able to create large sets of fully characterized BioBricks.

All teams collaborated across the globe, both with other high school teams and with collegiate teams. 2020’s crop of projects attempts to solve difficult challenges, like energy production and disease detection using creative synthetic biology and all of them deserve to be celebrated.

If you are an iGEMer, you are truly extraordinary. As you suffered through extended quarantines, failed gels, and the heat of wiki freeze, that message might have gotten lost. Your work is truly extraordinary.

How many of your peers will be able to reference a BioBrick in years to come?
How many of your peers have collaborated with global teams?
How many have thought about the ethics of their scientific work?

If you competed in iGEM, you did all of that; and that makes you a rare breed and a critical component of our future.

Why is High School iGEM important?

The rest of you may be wondering why iGEM is important. What is it about the High School iGEM experience that makes the huge investment in money and time from students, parents, advisors, and the synthetic biology community worthwhile? How can these few high school students really contribute to significant changes in our world?

Let’s face it, the technology changes in this field are so rapid that the techniques they are learning now will be obsolete when and if they become researchers. Aren’t we wasting resources having them learn skills that will be outdated so quickly? But we’re missing it …

“iGEM led me to realize that science is a multifaceted discipline that encapsulates a broad spectrum of study that I am intrigued to learn more about and uncover.”

- Melanie Kim, Lambert_GA student

The importance of the iGEM experience can only be understood when we realize that iGEM is so much more than the scientific competition and the wet lab skills. The impact of iGEM becomes evident as a result of the values of openness, cooperation, and friendly competition.

Five Stages of High School iGEM

If you haven’t been a high school iGEM competitor, let me break it down for you in 5 simple phases…

The high school iGEM experience begins with naïve ambition. The students don’t know what they don’t know, and so aren’t constrained by what has been done before. Teams often start with big dreams and aren’t afraid of losing funding, or having a fear of publisher rejection.

High school teams are often generalists, and not constrained to the specialty of a collaborating university lab. This allows the teams to explore more creatively, and become truly inspired through their human practices. They set up their project goals based on that enthusiastic energy.

Research and Experimentation → Failure → Growth

Teams then move into the research and experimentation phase, which often lead to the critical reality of science: failure. This phase is often filled with stress and frustration, but this is actually what makes it great. Why? Because iGEMers have to learn how to problem-solve, how to iterate, how to persevere through the setbacks to strive for results. Even when those results aren’t the ones they hoped for.

It is during this phase that students are often truly humbled by the weight of the science that they are attempting. But it is also in this phase that real growth takes place.

Collaboration is the next phase: meetups, video calls with other teams, swapping we chats, sharing stories, and making friends across political and cultural barriers. Unlike so many science competitions, iGEM is collaboration within teams, between teams, and within communities. Through these contexts, students begin to feel valued, empowered, and energized to continue.

Next comes the communication phase, heavy with important deadlines. It includes the abstract, promotional video, dreaded wiki freeze, presentation, and poster. Not only do students learn the importance of time management (we could probably all use some of that), but more importantly they learn how to communicate complex topics to others in understandable language that is also made visually appealing. If only more professional scientists had the marketing skills of these high schoolers, maybe more of the general public would trust our scientists.

The next phase is celebration at the iGEM Jamboree. Teams show off their experimental designs, inventions, measurements. And in turn they learn to appreciate the creativity, mathematical modeling, and excellence of other teams

It is a place where new ideas are sparked, and future projects take root. The synbio industry knows this. The world’s ethics, safety and security groups all watch the teams and the projects at the Jamboree. In fact, many of today’s successful biotech companies have arisen from iGEM projects. The human practices work done by teams helps inform the policies of the world’s biosafety and bioethics community.

Teams compete against themselves – against themselves! – to earn medals. And what creates a reason to celebrate varies from team to team. Some are victorious in just making it to the Jamboree. And some teams are just as thrilled at earning a Bronze as earning a Gold. Excellence is awarded in many areas at the Jamboree through the Special Prizes, and these celebrations and recognitions are rewards for the months of labor.

But at the end of the day, iGEM celebration is more than joy over a sticker. The true celebration comes from the shared experiences of frustration, collaboration, perseverance, and recognition of each other’s excellence.

Why is High School iGEM critical to our future?

All of the mindsets that are developed throughout the process – naïve ambition, ethical inspiration, problem solving, perseverance in the face of failure, collaboration, effective communication, and celebration – are exactly what are needed to solve the challenges of the future.

We must create a generation of thinkers who can look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals and be able to envision ways to collaborate, engineer, and communicate to solve them. We need to use the power of DNA storage, programming, self-assembly, and infinite sequence possibilities to engineer these solutions.

And when does that work begin? If we wait until students are in university, it is too late. The foundational work begins earlier, in high school. Learning about the possibilities of synbio in high school opens the avenues of career possibilities, obviously. But more importantly, the iGEM experience helps to create mindsets that are critical to solving our global problems. iGEM teaches kids that failure is just a step in the process and that challenges are best approached through openness and shared community.

The Gap

In the United States, we have a problem. And I don't think we're alone in having this problem. According to the US Department of Education, 50% of students who start in STEM fields in college drop out just after the first couple of years. So why is this? Why the huge attrition rate? Why the brain-drain of some of our best and brightest?

There is a myriad of factors, well beyond the scope of this post. So, I’m going to focus on one of the main reasons that students give for leaving STEM fields. They report that they didn’t realize science was hard. They didn’t expect to fail. They lacked the resilience to persist.

And this is exactly where iGEM prepares students for the reality of STEM careers. iGEM teams know all about failure. They have to endure through the challenges. And they collectively celebrate those difficulties at the Jamboree. iGEM is an incubator, not just of future biotech companies. It also grows students that realize that failure is informative, and it is a beginning and not the end.

Looking to the Future iGEM

According to the UN economic and social 2020 statistics, high school iGEMers represent just 0.0002% of the world’s population of 15-19 year olds. And collegiate iGEMers represent just 0.0006% of the world’s population of 20-25 year olds. This leaves a huge gap. A gap that we need to bridge to solve our global issues. How can we fill that gap?

Some ideas for High School iGEM teams include:

Reach out to the local university and, specifically, reach out to the professors working in synthetic biology.
Ask the professors to add an outreach component to their grant proposals. Even $5k, $10k, or $15k can make all the difference in a high school team participating or not.
Raise awareness of the value of High School iGEM to encourage partnerships between high school iGEM teams and local universities and community labs.
Build your High School iGEM program over time, adding equipment as the needs arise and the opportunities become available (some professors may be able to help).

In closing, to iGEMers I say: Don’t let this iGEM season be your last. There is life after iGEM, and it is literally called “After iGEM” that you are welcome to join. For many of you, this may be your last season as a competitor. Some of you may go on to join collegiate teams. But hopefully, even collegiate teams will not be your last involvement. Additionally, I encourage you to volunteer for the iGEM committees, be a guide at a future Jamboree, and eventually become a judge and give back to this community that has given to you.

And even if you never join another iGEM space, please take the experiences and the resilience that you have learned out into your spheres of influence. Bring the iGEM values of openness, collaboration and friendly competition into society and help create a future that we all can live in. Thank you!

The views expressed by the author are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion and policy of that of the iGEM Foundation.