MRC/GENOME CENTRE CENTENARY OPEN DAY, FRIDAY 21st JUNE
The Centenary Open Day is to be held in the Fulton building on the Susssex campus and will combine talks, discussions and hand-on experiments with an exhibition of scientific images and art installations to explore... Repair of DNA Damage, 'What we know and how we know it'.
MRC/Genome Damage & Stability Centre Centenary Open Day Friday 21st June [PDF 5.90MB]
Website link: http://mrc-genome-openday.com/
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Together with the MRC, scientists from the Genome Centre coordinated the science exhibition at the Brighton Science Festival, at Hove Park Upper School, on Saturday 19 Feb 2011.
The exhibition aimed at 7-14 year olds (and their families) and involved a static exhibition, ‘About the brain’, along with some interactive demonstrations and activities that suited a range of ages. At the MRC stand, scientists used various games to engage with the public and ask why the government funds research on genetic diseases. This was one example: “At the heart of the billions of cells that make up our body is an instruction manual – DNA. We use four letters to code all the information contained in DNA: A, T, C and G. The letters are used in groups of three. A group of three is called a codon. Because each codon has three letters, the instruction manual can get pretty long. To avoid this, scientists have made a kind of shorthand, and have given each codon its own letter, corresponding to the alphabet. For fun, we can reverse this process on any word by converting each letter to the corresponding codon, and find its "DNA sequence". This was obviously tried with a variety of kids and they seemed to enjoy it!
Thanks to people participated:
Andrew Ridley, Jessica Hudson, Jon Baxter, Penny Jeggo, Tony Carr, Meryem Alagoz, Helfrid Hochegger, Sherif El-Khamisy