Human Practice

1.Conduct survey:

In this spring, we had the second brainstorm for our iGEM project. At that time, we heard that a team member’s classmate was diagnosed of leukemia, and the most probably causes of his disease is formaldehyde released in their house, because His family’s house had just been decorated last year! All team members were astonished when we heard this news, so we decided to focus on formaldehyde indoors eliminating for our project.

Before we start our project, we prepared a survey about formaldehyde knowledge and a lecture to the public. We went to Shandong Science & Technological Museum. The main reason why we chose there was that there would be many parents with young children during every weekends. As young children, along with the olds, are the ones that are most likely to be affected by this carcinogenic substance. So we tried to tell their parents how to get rid of formaldehyde and give a better protection to their baby.

Questionnaire:

After deciding the main focus of our iGEM project, which is about the eradication of formaldehyde, we carried out a survey to the public, trying to find their understanding of this substance. In order to enlarge the potential sample and get engaged with more of the masses, we gave out both paper questionnaires, and conducted an online survey on two of the most popular chatting apps (WeChat and QQ) in China. The paper questionnaires were mainly given to people who live in the Jinan, where our school is in. The online ones were even more effective than we thought, as users did not have to install other apps to get access to this survey both by scanning the QR code we posted on the official account of our school, or just searching for the key word ‘formaldehyde’. We received 910 (this was the data when this page was created) responses in total, and we found that although most of the respondents had a good understanding towards the hazardous effect of this substance, only few of them picked the correct answer about how to eradicate it in door.

After analyzing the results of the survey, we found that the main problem was that the public did not have a clear understanding of the ways to eradicate formaldehyde indoor. Considering about the fact most of them chose the wrong answer in how to deal with this substance, we gave several lectures at the Shandong Science and Technology Museum during August, explaining to the public the most effective way to get the room free of formaldehyde, which is to maintain a good ventilation, and talked about how our project could also be used to solve this problem.

That questionnaire results showed two questions attracted from JNFLS team’s survey as followings.

Based on the results the survey revealed, we continued to conduct publicity.

2.Introduce our project and Synthetic Biology

We gave different lectures about our project and synthetic Biology, as well as ethical issue of Synthetic Biology individually. Taking the permission from the museum, we prepared different speech content to different population.

After all of those events above were completed, we wrote a newsletter about our iGem project and what we did so far, including the whole design, Human Practices, the introduction of formaldehyde. Then we published it to the official account of our school on the most popular chatting app called WeChat to demonstrate our work to more people.

Our team members also went to the other three high school to propagate. We introduced what Synthetic Biology is and discussed ethical issue in it with middle school students. Considering students in middle school just start to learn Biology, we only taught basic section to them.

We took the related difficult part to our high school’s Biochemistry Club. High school students hold more knowledge asset to understand what we said. Recently, the project teaching will be prepared for club recruitment.

3.Comics publicity

Some of our team members drew several comic scripts to describe how our project works to solve the problem of formaldehyde. We have to admit that, without professional artist help, we failed to make the final graph looked more appealing, but we are still proud of it. We published our art work to a very popular comic app in China called KK Comics, which is also accessible both from the Internet and WeChat at the same time.

Our main aim was to explain clearly what we actually did to the public and we thought that, with the demonstration of pictures, readers would find it easier to understand, even to those who bears little knowledge towards biochemistry.

Through the comic propaganda, there is a dramatic increase in the public engagement. We gained useful response, showed in followings.

4.Study and discussion of ethical issue

During the session of 6th CCiC, we attended a lecture given by a professor who talked about the safety and moral issues involving gene editing, and we think that we got a deeper understanding about the responsibilities of scientists, especially that moral responsibility.

As high school students, we feel the need of a moral compass in our mind, which is crucial for us if we become scientists some day, so this is also a main focus of our Human Practices. By attending one meeting about the biosafty and moral issues involving molecule biology, especially gene editing, we think that we got a bit clue about why moral issues are important for this field of research and experiments. During that session, we heard about the story happened in the fall of the last year, which was about the gene-edited baby. The main thing we learnt was that, as the off-targeting rate of the technique was high, it might lead to other unwanted potential problems to the baby. What makes it worse is that this change or damage is hereditary and it would be passed to the offspring of this baby. All the potential damage would be irriversible, so we need to make sure that this kind of technology would never be miss-used, at least in our hands. After returning back to school, we also made a simple explaination about the CRISPR technique to the fresh year students who were also interested in biochemistry. Then, we talked about the moral issues and the possible consequences of miss-use of it, most of which were leanrt from CCiC in Shenzhen.