Bacteriality tag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2011-09-23:/gralnick/myblog//14495 2011-09-24T23:37:38Z A voice of reason in microbiology and science. Excited by well-controlled, meaningful experiments. Proponent of Synthetic Biology to solve the world's problems. Champion of bacteria, archaea and yeast (they give us beer otherwise the euk's would be off the blog!). Movable Type Enterprise 4.31-en 30 Second Elevator Speech tag:blog.lib.umn.edu,2011:/gralnick/myblog//14495.309790 2011-09-23T21:02:27Z 2011-09-24T23:37:38Z Today we learned about the art and structure of the 30 second elevator speech. You've got a short amount of time to grab someone's attention and leave them with a lasting impression. Here is mine: Energy affects more people on... gralnick http://www.cbs.umn.edu/labs/gralnick/Home.html Today we learned about the art and structure of the 30 second elevator speech. You've got a short amount of time to grab someone's attention and leave them with a lasting impression. Here is mine:


Energy affects more people on our planet than all diseases, natural disasters and bad TV shows combined. Burning fossil fuels for energy heavily impacts our environment; and regardless of your stance on climate change, fossil fuels are in fact a limited resource. So what happens when we run out!?** My lab is re-writing the code of life to engineer microbes that will someday make fuels and renewable compounds for us using electricity. The world is full of microbes - let's use them to keep the world full of people too.


Not too bad!? The COMPASS workshop class liked it. I deliberately tried to make it funny from the start, since being funny reflects my personality. I took out this sentence at the ** point because I thought it would be too long:

Imagine something between a zombie apocalypse and Michelle Bachman running our country.

Without the above sentence I was clocked at 29 seconds, which was just what we were asked to shoot for.

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