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Figure 2.A. shows an image of Dr Jay Vacanti work of successful growth of a human ear from cartilage cells on the back of a mouse. Image B shows that 29% of people associated the image with synthetic biology, and 71% associated it with genetic modification.
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Figure 3.A. shows an image of a wild African bush elephant. Image B shows that 100% of people recognised it was natural.
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Figure 4.A. shows an image of an agar plate containing e.coli that has been transformed to express green fluorescence protein (GFP). Image B shows that 60% of people considered this to be genetic modification, and 40% considered this to be synthetic biology
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Figure 5.A. shows an image of purple tomatoes, which scientists have developed which may boost health due to their anti-cancer properties. Image B shows how 92% of people understood the purple tomatoes to be genetically modified, whereas 8% thought it was synthetic biology.
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Human Practice In Schools
In order to get the perspective of children and their views on synthetic biology we were able to ask the children questions during the SAW project when synthetic biology remained the theme for the whole of their schooling day. Every child was asked the same question...“After learning more about DNA and designing a synthetic organism of your own do you fear the topic of synthetic biology?”.
One of the limitations of our iGEM experience was that there was only a set amount of time in which to organise and run our outreach events hindered even more by the fact that iGEM takes place over the school’s summer holidays. Due to this we were unable to hold more outreach events during the children’s term time and we had only the data we were able to collect in this time to analyse shown by the graphs below.
Approaching the issue of Human Practice and planning and implementing outreach events gave the members of our iGEM team an opportunity for self reflection. Every member of the iGEM team has gained something from taking part and a couple of our iGEM team members wrote about their experiences which can be seen on our outreach page.
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 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.
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