Thousands braved the lively Scottish autumn weather to explore the science going on at the University's King’s Buildings Campus. Image This year, the Centre welcomed 367 visitors to the Roger Land Building on Saturday 29th September where they explored science as varied as synthetic biology through to infectious diseases. The Centre provided hands on arts and crafts activity, designed by Dr Gaynor Campbell, to explain how we can engineer in novel features to cells to make them useful tools to fight major global challenges. Kids also got involved with designing and building plasmids to encode their features of choice – from oil munching bacteria to new enamel for teeth. This year, other groups from across the School of Biology got involved with topics such as immunology, animal parasites and malaria. The University constructed the Roger Land Building in the 1960s to house the Animal Research Organisation. The architect, Sir Basil Spence, is renowned for his modernist design of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed during WWII. The Roger Land Building then housed the Institute for Stem Cell Research before being renovated for the School of Biological Sciences and the hub for the UK Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology. This article was published on 2024-06-17
