Team:Unimelb/Human Practices

Human Practices

Our goals were to engage our community and gather their bioethical opinions. To this end, we first spoke to academics in the bioethical community to learn from the existing body of research and literature in this field. A finding that was particularly stood out to us was from the Inspire and Reason Community Attitude to Genetic Modification in 2017. They found that despite only 52% of the population knowing what synthetic biology was, 62% believed that it would benefit their lives.

The academic mentors Associate professor Megan Munsie and Dr Claire Tanner helped us design our own survey for the community. Questacon, whose Born or Built exhibition had similarly polled the general public about genetic engineering, gave us access to their results and questions. With this, we were able to see which questions were divisive, provocative and pertinent to the Australian public. This allowed us to design a comprehensive survey. Initially, we had designed a series of short applications of syn bio and asked for opinions (figure 1). However, this evolved with the input of academics and became a survey of fewer questions that were instead long-form and scenario based (figure 2) with space for explanation and written justification. As a result, we got quantitative and qualitative results from participants. Furthermore, one of the questions was particularly relevant to our project and enabled us to directly receive feedback from the public on our experimental design

Figure 2. The results include a finding that 83% of participants (n=98) thought that our project was morally okay (figure 3).

Figure 3. Another notable finding was that the average scientific knowledge between people who agreed vs disagreed with our project had the largest discrepancy of each scenario (figure 4).

Figure 4. Adaptation response.