Team:UNICAMP-EMSE Brazil/Human Practices/CAEB

Human Practices 2: CAEB presentation

Biennially, Unicamp´s biology students organize a conference called CAEB ("Congresso Aberto aos Estudantes de Biologia"), which gathers biology students from all over Brazil. This year about 1,000 undergraduate students participated in the conference, which happened from July 25^th to July 29^th, 2011 at UNICAMP, Campinas-São Paulo, Brazil.
We decided to use this opportunity to make a lecture to divulge our IGEM team´s project to the students, and share what we´ve been learning about synthetic biology with them. Most of them had never heard about synthetic biology or iGEM before. It was a really good experience to us, since the students enjoyed our presentation. We hope some of them subscribe an iGEM team to next year´s jamboree in order to make Brazilian´s participation higher in the competition. We used questionaries to collect information about the public audience and to determine their degree of familiarity with Genetic Engineering and Synthetic Biology. Additionally, we aimed to receive a feedback about the idea of our project and future perspectives.

Click here to see the results of our survey.

Pictures

CAEB gallery

Audience attending the lecture	Part of audience in the final of the lecture	Danieli Gonçalves gave the talk first part
Danieli Gonçalves explaining to the audience what is iGEM and what is Genetic Engineering and Synthetic Biology	Izabella Pena-Neshich gave the talk second part	Izabella Pena-Neshich explaining about our project, stress and immunology
Part of UNICAMP-EMSE team students	Conclusions slide	In the end, we promoted a discussion with part of the audience about genetic engineering, synthetic biology and our project

Survey results

The audience public answered a short questionnarie for the purpose of gathering information about their profile, interests and knowledge. 20 people accepted to answer the surveys. The questions and results are the following:

These two graphics above can inform us about the profile of the public who attended the lecture we gave in CAEB. We can see that most of them are Undergraduate students of Biological Sciences programs, and also some graduate students participated. The great majority of the interviwed have at least heard about Synthetic Biology, with a expressive percentage of people who declared that know Very Good, Good or regular about the theme. This is very interesting, since we can compare with the data obtained when high-school studens answered that they have no knoledge about this field. This may indicate to us that the Universities are starting to teach Synthetic Biology to their students, but this is not occuring in the schools, which we think is very important. Disseminate Genetic Engineering and Synthetic Biology to school students is similar to sowing some tree seeds. Some years later, the concrete results will appear: scientists, studing genetic engineering and certainly they will continue the cycle: encouraging new students to follow this way.

From the three graphics above, we can conclude that most of the interviewed people have never heard about iGEM. By looking at the second result, which suggest that most of public would like to participate in a competition like iGEM. This may indicate that we were able to awake interest in iGEM in the public. Similar pattern was observed in the High-school students survey results. Thus, we may conclude that we successfully disseminated iGEM ideas and how interesting this competition is. The third graphic inform us about the general interest themes of the audience. There is a clear tendency to interest in Health, which can be biased since the title of our talk was "Synthetic Biology, iGEM and Stress Wars - fighting against pathogenic bacteria which attacks host under stress". This title was divulged and probably some people were interested in understanding about heath stuff.

We can conclude by looking at these graphics that people evaluated the development and ethic status of Genetic Engineering in Brazil positively. These graphics also address some other important points: how the interviwed see the development of this scientific field and their ethical status. Interestingly, the people who informed that have no knoledge in Genetic Engineering and Synthetic Biology answered that either the development and ethical conditions are poor. As we know, Brazilian Government is massively investing in this area, mainly regarding bioenergy. Additionaly, there are many efforts in developing this area in order to solve health and industrial problems. We believe that by disseminating the knoledge in this area, we can convince people that important things are being developed and that this is a very important area. Approximating this scientific field to the people may cause more acceptance of new knolwdge and also, make them to contribute to this development. By elaborating this survey, creating the Genetic Engineering Video Class and asking people on the street, we’re already contributing for this.