The Long Night of Science 2019

From early afternoon to midnight every year in June, over 70 scientific institutions across Berlin and Potsdam open their doors and give an insight into their work, conduct exciting experiments and present cutting-edge research with around 28,000 visitors a year. This annual event is an opportunity to share and demonstrate, to people of all age groups, the pioneering research being carried out at BAM. This year’s event again featured research developed within the EU ITN projects “BioCapture” and “GlycoImaging”.
As ESRs, this outreach event helped build on scientific communication and linguistic skills to an audience of varying ages, creeds and backgrounds. A particularly fulfilling part of the event was enthusing the younger audience by showcasing various experiments which received a lot of positive feedback. The importance of analytical chemistry and its presence in everyday life was a key take-home message to all those who attended. The importance of rapid, cheap and easy detection of cancer biomarkers at early stages, as done so in the “BioCapture” network, was of particular interest to the public.
Utilising colour and fluorescence, young and old were easily convinced by on-site demonstrations that such methods might hold a bright future for cancer diagnostics.