KinderUni Cologne

Children get a taste of science

What are the different cells in the body, what do my own cells look like and how do you get the DNA out of a banana or tomato? These were the questions Cologne children explored in workshops at the Cologne Children's University under the guidance of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing.

Our body is made up of an unimaginably large number of cells. There are many different types of cells, for example nerve cells, skin cells and muscle cells. And in the cells there are also organelles, such as mitochondria or the cell nucleus, which contains our genetic information, the DNA.

"We take our young researchers on a journey into the body. They experiment at different stations and learn about cells and, incidentally, about experimenting in the laboratory," explains Maren Berghoff, responsible for public relations at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing.

Another workshop was supervised by three doctoral students from the Langer department as part of SFB 1218. "Volunteering our time and giving the children an insight into the structure of our genome was a lot of fun," says Eileen Cors, who introduced the children to laboratory life and the structure of human DNA. "Not only did the children learn a lot in the process, but we did too."

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