Survey:
Synthetic biology is a new discipline in the 21st century, and we suspected that its popularity is not very high, so we released a survey to find out people's knowledge of synthetic biology and iGEM. Consistent with our hypothesis, most people have heard about synthetic biology and iGEM competitions but have no deep understanding of them. The following is part of the data from our questionnaire:
First, in order to reduce the data bias caused by age, we collected samples from different age groups:
Then we investigated their understanding of synthetic biology and got the following data:
The result shows that 43.17% people have never heard of "synthetic biology" and 30.6% people have heard of it but have no idea what it means, which was quite unexpected – we never thought there would be so many people who didn't understand synthetic biology and this was why we tried to introduce synthetic biology in our community.
For the people who know synthetic biology a little bit and quite understand it, we specifically asked them to think about the difference between synthetic biology and conventional transgenes.
Even though about a quarter of them have some understanding in synthetic biology, they do not clearly know what it means: nearly half of them cannot tell the difference between traditional gene editing and synthetic biology.
Finally, we asked the respondents’ understanding of iGEM.
Compared with synthetic biology, fewer people know about iGEM: less than half of the respondents have heard of it, and only 4.68% have experienced it.
Even though it accorded with our predictions, we were still surprised by little people know about synthetic biology and iGEM. To improve the current situation, we decided to spread the knowledge to people around us. And we decided to start from our own campus: we established a club to share basic knowledge in synthetic biology with the students who are interested in this area
Broadcast:
We went to Shenzhen Media Group (SZMG) and broadcasted a speech to all
Shenzhen citizens about synthetic biology. We talked about the definition
of synthetic biology and its bright prospect. As the current society is in
urgent need of interdisciplinary intellects, we also mentioned STEAM
education and explained the importance of cross-area working. We then
introduced iGEM, a derivative of STEAM. First, we started with the history
of iGEM, then talked about the various abilities required for iGEM
competition, and finally we briefly described the process of iGEM
competition and the substantial benefits we can get from it. We also shared
our own experience of participating in the iGEM competition and the
difficulties we encountered. In this way, we successfully propagated
synthetic biology to the public and gave them a better understanding about
the content of iGEM. Still feeling inadequate, we decided to further spread
the basic knowledge about synthetic biology so we established a club in
order to teach students who are interested in synthetic biology and would
like to participate in iGEM competitions.
Club activity:
We decided to introduce synthetic biology to students around us, so we established a club to specifically introduced basic concept of synthetic biology such as the construction of genetic circuit. Many students showed interest in this subject and considered getting further education for Biology at college. We provided an opportunity for students to access to advanced biological knowledge.
Lecture:
One of our members went to the summer school of Brown University and introduced synthetic biology and our project through a presentation. We got feedback from the college students and two professors. Professor Jody Hall showed high enthusiasm in our project and looked forward to receive update from us. Professor Kara Lau gave us a lot of advice on our project and instructed us how to improve it.
When we made clear the design of our project, we wished to better understand the possibilities of future applications of our project. Therefore, we consulted the professionals in other fields.
