Team:Hong Kong-CUHK/Human practice/questionnaire

Questionnaire

Since the CUHK iGEM team aim to understand the perception of the public to the concept of genetic modification (GM) as well as Synthetic Biology, an online questionnaire designed by us was distributed in facebook. Several questions concerning science, GM and synthetic biology were raised. We were glad to see a diverging and yet meaningful result from the public with the total participation of 230, in which 113 of them are male and 117 are female. Participants are from different faculties including Art, Business Administration, Education, Engineering, Law, Medicine, Science as well as Social Science.

Interpretation

From the results, we found that:

·       88% of the participants believe that science has a great contribution to the development of the society. Many acknowledge the importance of science. 86% of the total find science interesting, which is good news to us as most of the public are not refusing to science.

·       Over60% of the participants think that GM products are safe to consume and only 10%of participants think that GM products cannot be popularly applied in the society. It can be deduced that the acceptance from public to GM products is high and yet can be further promoted.

·       Only half of the participants have heard of Synthetic Biology before. We believe more promotion can be done to let a larger proportion of people to get to know about this powerful novel scientific field of study.

·       Near 70% of the participants have thought of utilizing bacteria to benefit the society. Furthermore, if a product,consisting of non-disease causing bacteria, brings convenience to user, over80% of the participants will choose to use it. It can be deduced that the public accept the concept of using product consists of bacteria. The human practice on Synthetic Biology has its effect achieved.

·       Two-third of the total think that the process of genetically controlling bacteria is dangerous and only 20% of the participants believe that it is not risky to use the product of Synthetic Biology. It is glad to see that the public might have noticed the potential risks of Synthetic Biology. However, we suggest more safety issues in Synthetic Biology should be educated to the public. On one hand, to ease the worries of the public on the safety of it. On the other hand, to address the issue professionally to the public so they can know more about it in an efficient way.

·       Finally, we raise the issue of ethics, whether human beings have the right to control bacteria just because we wish to. We hope to raise the concern from the public on this issue, to let them think more thoroughly on this.