The female body is subject to many taboos. Through creating our project, we hope to raise awareness and destigmatize female specific conditions affecting the vagina. Furthermore, we believe that communicating our science with the public in a safe, ethical, and informative way is absolutely critical to maintaining a good cycle of science. The Mertonian norm of communality, or the idea that scientists should share knowledge with each other to build and expand the knowledge of humanity, is something we take to heart very seriously. Our project has encountered some confusing, and null results. We have done our best to report these accurately. Null results give the world vital information even if they might be considered disappointing. Furthermore, we understand that, at its core, science is boring. The slowness and failure required to create something world changing is not glamorized by the media. Spin and hype only create a harder publishing world for science that finds null results, but these results are what drive us closer to creating a better world. This is why we have shared all of our experiments, whether they give us the results we were hoping for or not. To engage with science, we must be open.

When we don't represent the truth, when we focus only on our positives, we damage the bond between science and the public. The public needs to see all of our work. Flaws and all.

Because that is what science is.

Every presentation we have done, we’ve carried this ideation and belief in how we present. Not just to the public, but also in internal lab meetings as well.

We will be featured in Boston University’s main newspaper, BU Today. During the interviews conducted, we hope to convey the science of our project in a way that reflects our openness, and our excitement for the project. We hope to inspire more projects like ours that focus on women’s health, while still being applicable to the field of synthetic biology. We want to get the public informed, and enthusiastic about the things we have learned, and the progress we have made.