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Interviews

For our human practice we wanted to explore our central question; is synthetic biology feared by approaching the issue in a number of different ways.

Once the topic of synthetic biology had been introduced we wanted to know what people’s thoughts and feelings were on the matter and why they had these opinions. We conducted a number of interviews with the general public and planned synthetic biology based outreach events (please see our outreach Human Practices section) in order to gain both adults and children’s perspective. The interviews allowed us the chance to analyse responses and explore whether synthetic biology is in fact a feared topic.

Not only did we want to get people’s opinions on synthetic biology we also wanted to demonstrate that it is different from genetic modification and to see how many people knew of the difference between the two terms. This was achieved by offering definitions of each term during the interview and by showing a series of images which the interviewee could say they thought represented synthetic biology, genetic modification or nature. The responses from the interviews and the results for the image tests can be seen below.

Quantitative Data:

In order to collect quantitative data, we showed participants the following images during each interview and asked them to determine whether they perceived the image as representing synthetic biology, genetic modification, nature or even combinations of all three.

Figure 1.A shows a Tricolour Beagle dog, which was selectively bred to give the modern breed. Image B shows that 86% of the people we interviewed perceived the Beagle to be natural. However, 14% concluded it may also be genetically modified in terms of selective breeding, although does not involve the introduction of genes from a different species.