How does you DNA influence your behaviour, for example related to gaming? How can you use your DNA to improve yourself like a superhero? How are medicine tailored to your disease? These are all questions from high school students that they can answer during the film festival that they will organise under the guidance of scientists and film makers in our outreach project ‘DNA cinema’.

The NWO (Nederlandse organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) has given out a new round of grants for the NWA (Nationale Wetenschapsagenda). One of those grants was given to our team from the organisation GENE Amsterdam, consisting of dr. Dennis van ‘t Ent and Melanie de Wit (VU Amsterdam), and dr. Margot van de Weijer and me (AUMC).
In this project, we will cooperate with Scholieren Filmfestival and the audio-visual center of the VU to help high school students organise a film festival with the theme ‘Genetics in Society’. The students will select a main movie to stream in a theatre and make short movies about a self-chosen topic to stream beforehand. To make these videos scientifically accurate, the students will cooperate with researchers from the GENE Amsterdam network, which gives them a nice opportunity to network.
We hope to make students more aware of what genetics research is and how it is connected to society and their everyday lives. Hopefully, this will reduce the misconceptions they might have about genetics.
The grant funds a trial of the project at three different schools. During this trial, we will take steps to ensure that the continuation of the project is possible after the duration of the project. For example, we will reach out to master programmes so find students that can supervisor the high school students during their project.
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