PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

We provide the public with some content that will help them to fully understand life sciences, such as microbe painting to stimulate their love of life sciences; science for three minutes, easy to understand knowledge; survey for the public, let the public see the real meeting The impact of their decision on the development of synthetic biology.

Public facing questionnaire

To get a comprehensive understanding of how much people know about bacterial therapy and how they view it, we design some questionnaires. One of them is shown below.

In order to have a better understanding about the opinion the majorities have on microbial therapies, we conduct a survey aimed at different groups, such as teenagers, the middle ages, teachers, students and so on. According to our result, 80% of the participant are not related to life science, so we think that this result could represent public opinions about microbial therapies. We receive 458 questionnaires in the end.

In our survey, we briefly introduce Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), and we ask them how likely are they going to accept this treatment. The results are quite astonishing.

Only 5.02% state clearly that they won’t receive this treatment, it seems that many people can accept FMT and are willing to receive this treatment if needed. This is a good news to us, because the market for microbial treatment is far larger than we think.

And for gene editing bacteria, many people can accept them too, which quite confuse us because GMO are not accepted by the public.

We also discover that many people are willing to listen to doctor’s advice no matter how well they understand the treatment itself. So we think we may focus on doctors’ opinion.

We also conduct the survey on why you think microbial therapies is not safe, many people think that it is not well developed as the traditional methods, it may involve gene editing or something else.

But when we introduce our project’s appliance this year using microbial treatment to Parkinson, and we say that this treatment has the same effect as the traditional methods but much convenient, many people are willing to receive this treatment.

Facing this result, we think that the public may not have a clear understanding of what is microbial therapies, so we are planning to do another survey to learn what they think microbial therapies are and what they think are important and need to be solved in order to let microbial therapies to have a bright future.

3 Minutes for Science

Since we want more people to know what bacterial therapy is, we started from the most familiar part for people --probiotics and made a video to help people have a better understanding of it.

To make our sound heard by more people, we stood upon a wide stage to talk to more people about our enthusiasm! SEE OUR VIDEO..

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition

To find more possibilities in our project of microbial therapy, we wanted to explore the commercial value and popularity of our project and microbial therapy. Therefore, we seized the chance to take part in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition which would provide assistance from professions and investor support. Through more than a month of training and learning, we made it to finals. On 26th August, we ran in the subitem final of it and got the third prize with bonus and appreciation from both researchers and business entrepreneurship. Thus, we have more confidence of our project and its future improvement! SEE MORE.

Foretaste of creating personal synthetic biology work

On June 1st, we invited college students from Biology major, most of whom are freshmen, to our lab and encourage them to create their personal bacterial painting.

Hoping to inspire interest of students for Biology, help them see more of their future learning and develop a concept that science is both serious and interesting, we held the bacterial painting activity in our lab. The E. coli played the role of adding color to the paintings. These engineered E. coli could express different kinds of chromoprotein, including aeBlue, fwYellow, eforRed , SpisPink and so on. During the procedure of painting with cotton swabs and bacterial fluid, the patterns were all colorless. But with the incubating time passing by, E. coli expressed and accumulated more chromoproteins, the painting got brighter and more colorful gradually. As the foretaste of creating their personal bacterial painting, we popularized more than biological theories behind, but an idea of science can be interesting.

Excellent interaction with children in Beijing military museum

Invited by Beijing science popularization league, we came to Beijing military museum to give presentation about synthetic biology. Also, we had the chance to communicate with children. With our education video, we played games with children and had an interesting interaction with them. After this activity, we hope our children can experience the fun of science and understand that science is everywhere in our life.

Communicating with people from all walks of life

People with different professional background usually view the same from different aspects so get people from all walks of life evolved was always what we try to do. We also present this part in our Compass. SEE MORE..