Team:UNICAMP-EMSE Brazil/Human Practices/EMSE Pres

Human Practices 3: EMSE presentation

On September 23rd, Marc Emery and Thibault Sabattier did a presentation at the EMSE, opened to everyone, during which they introduced a group (engineer students, professors and researchers) to synthetic biology, the iGEM competition and the “Stress Wars” project. All students and professors were invited to attend it and in the end, they were given the opportunity to participate to our survey. As a result, 16 persons (professors, PhD students and undergraduate students) agreed to answer it.

This was the final step of a long process that started with the team selection. Before taking part in the iGEM competition, french students had no experience in molecular or synthetic biology. Once selected, they started reading about it and once they came to Brazil, they got in touch with the "bench". With our brazilian advisors as instructors, they were able to perform great part of the experiments. The proof of how much they have developed is the lecture they gave at their university (EMSE).

Click here to see the results of our survey.

Pictures

EMSE talk gallery

Survey results

After a conference given at the EMSE in France, 16 people agreed to answer our short survey in order to gather information concerning their knowledge about Synthetic Biology and their personal opinions. Here are the results of this survey:

The audience was composed of 13 students, 2 professors and one PhD student. To have interesting results we decided to split them into two groups: on the one hand the students (left diagrams) and on the other hand the professors and PhD student (right diagrams). Indeed, the professors and PhD students already knew Synthetic Biology and say they have a good knowledge about it whereas the majority of the students have an average or less knowledge of this field.

We can notice that some students already knew a few things about Synthetic Biology, which means that this new science area begins to be spread and known in the French universities and engineering schools. It is positive and encouraging: we need to keep on making more and more people discover this interesting area and we are proud to be part of its spreading.

According to the survey, most of the audience would be interested in participating in the iGEM competition although they had never heard about it before. This indicates that we managed to arouse their interest in iGEM, which was the main goal of our lecture: our presentation and communication about iGEM was successful! This also means that more generally iGEM really interests people and will benefit from more communication in the world. If more and more people knew about it, Synthetic Biology could develop faster than ever. In the third graphics, we can see that the Health area is clearly on top of the audience interest for such a project. This peculiarity can be explained by the fact that the EMSE has an important research center focusing on Health. That’s why many students in the audience may be interested more particularly in this field. Moreover, all the surveyed think that Synthetic Biology is an important tool of research and development of new technologies in health, industry and environment and agree that the “Stress Wars” project could contribute to the health and medical field.

The professors and PhD students who knows a bit more about this subject than the undergraduate students, think that the development of genetic engineering in France is in the average or good and that the ethical status of research in France is good or very good. The students are a bit less positive. Maybe they think about the controversies about the GMO’s in agriculture. Indeed France doesn’t feel yet really comfortable with GMO’s but the field of genetic engineering is clearly developing. We hope we are contributing to this development because we believe that the more we talk about it and make people aware of the improvements we can do with it, the faster it will develop.