Wiki Missouri Miners

Outreach

We wanted to see how people from very distinct backgrounds think about genetic engineering. Once we knew that, we could use that information to educate them in the most efficient way possible on the opportunities and risks this technology presents.

First Methodist Church

We were fortunate enough to be invited to speak at a local religious organization. Here, we were able to facilitate a discussion on the topics of genetic engineering. This data gathered here was used as the basis for our eventual survey.

Kaleidoscope Discovery Center

Many of our members spent the last couple of semesters teaching science and math classes at the Kaliedoscope Discovery Center. This facility functions to provide STEM education to homeschool students. Here, our members were able to get an understanding of the current state of STEM education. These helped in the development of the survey and interpretation of its results.

Missouri S&T Alumni

For this year's homecoming, our team was invited to attend an event for the gathering of alumni. We showed off the plates we had created and spoke with the alumni about the place genetic engineering has in the world. This gave us insight into the minds of a more mature generation and current industry professionals.

Survey

Creation of the Survey After gathering the initial data from the First Methodist Church, we set out to create an official survey. We wanted our survey to get a raw look at how people thought about genetic engineering and synthetic biology. To do this, we sought an outside perspective. We coordinated with Dr. Daniel Shank in the Psychological Science Department at Missouri S&T. He helped us shape our survey in a way that would provide the data most true to people's actual thoughts and feelings. He also gave us advice on the structure of the survey and even its dissemination.

Survey Dissemination Our goal was to reach as large and diverse a pool of responses as possible. All of our members were encouraged to send out the survey as far and wide as they could. We were also fortunate enough to have contacts at the University of Chicago iGEM team to share our survey with. We even took the survey as a Google Form to recruiting events. We received a large number of responses. However, despite our best efforts, a majority of responses were from college or college students. We were sure to keep this in mind when analyzing the data.

Some Freaky Cool Data!

68

Percent of people have not heard of synthetic biology

75

Percent of people find genetically engineered crops completely acceptable

74

Percent of people find human cosmetic genetic modification unacceptable

8

Non-Religious people were 8% more likely to find genetic engineering acceptable.

Survey Data

Below are the results of the survey. This represents the order in which the questions were asked. They were placed in order of what our team believed to be increased invasiveness. Survey takers were asked to rate how acceptable they personally found each of the topics. With 1. Completely Unacceptable, 2. Unacceptable, 3. Neutral, 4. Acceptable, and 5. Completely Acceptable.

Ongoing Genetic Research

For the most part, people did not seem to take issue with the study of genetic engineering.

Government Subsidization

There was a more even spread of opinions here, but again, the large majority did not feel negatively towards government subsidization

Genetically Engineered Crops

In this case, many people seemed to find genetically engineered crops acceptable. This was surprising due to the large anti-GMO movement. Our team inferred that people may not understand what GMOs are or their link to genetic engineering.

Genetic Blindness Treatment

This question was posed to see how people felt about genetically altering humans. Such treatments do already exist, and the large majority of those surveyed did not feel negatively toward this kind of treatment.

Genetic Deafness Treatment

This question was posed to gauge opinions on the treatment of a disease that is not always seen as a disability. The results for this question were almost nearly identical to that of the genetic treatment of blindness.

Breast Cancer Chance Reduction - No Side Effects

This question was posed to determine how people felt about editing a human embryo rather than an adult human. Predictably, more people found this kind of treatment unacceptable compared to treatments on adults.

Breast Cancer Chance Reduction - Side Effects

This is the first question where the majority did not feel positively toward the treatment. It seems that there is a fine line where genetic engineering of humans becomes unacceptable to the general public.

Genetic Cosmetic Changes

Very few survey takers found this kind of treatment acceptable, although not zero. This seemed to say that for the most part, the public finds cosmetic changes to human genes unacceptable.

Discussion and Conclusion

Before the survey began, we predicted that the public's perceived acceptability of these topics would decrease as in accordance with the order the questions were asked. We did observe this trend. However, there were still various interesting and even surprising results with the data.

First, we were surprised to find that only 36% of people had heard of synthetic biology. We did not predict that it would be so low, and this changed how we considered the rest of the answers. In our bubble of genetic engineering knowledge, we often forget that the general public is not aware of the function and properties of synthetic biology. This means that people likely have little to know information on very important topics. This data provided a reference point around which to base the rest of our analysis.

Second,the majority of the survey takers found the genetic engineering of crops. This despite a large anti-Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) movement in agriculture. This seemed to imply that people may not understand the link between genetic engineering and GMOs. This is a testament to the strength of misinformation. It was also encouraging as it indicated, that people would be more responsive to GMOs if they understood them better.

Third, a large portion of people still found the genetic modification of human embryos to be acceptable. This is potentially a double edged sword.The genetic engineering of human embryos often raising the ethical dilemma of removing the choice from that individual. This is encouraging as it means people would be supportive of potentially incredibly beneficial research. However, we must take care to ensure that such research is done ethically. Public support is good, but we must make sure we understand what we are supporting.

Fourth,When observing the difference between the religious and the non-religious and interesting trend arose. For every single question, the non-religious, on average found the technique or treatment described acceptable. This indicates that the religious population may be more skeptical of such technologies. This is valuable information that can be used to address common concerns about these fields of science and shape the way in which we present the information.