Team:Calgary Ethics/Adult Surveys

The Surveys: How much do people know about Synthetic Biology and what do they think about it?

"As bioengineers continue to build things with the stuff of life itself, the rest of the world is slowly waking up to the power of synthetic biology." (Fong, 2008)

With the rapid advancement of synthetic biology, there are many ethical issues associated that will become increasingly important. The general public is likely to be impacted by new developments in the field, yet most people are largely unaware of Synthetic Biology. One study found that more than 80% of Americans had heard little or nothing about the field (Braman, Kahan, Mandel, 2008.) Since Synthetic Biology has implications on a global scale, our team sought to get a comprehensive understanding of how members of different groups across many countries knew about synthetic biology and what their opinions were on the risks and benefits of the field.

We developed two online surveys to target two main populations:

The Adult Survey: Targeted members of NGO's, government, Industry, University (both faculty and students) and participants of the 2008 iGEM competition. (click here for a copy of the survey)

The High School Survey: Targeted high school students participating in extra-curricular summer programs geared toward science and engineering. (click here for a copy of the survey)

Both surveys were exploratory in nature. We relied mainly on open ended questions and provided only one general definition of synthetic biology at the beginning of the survey. This was done in an effort to minimize bias.

The Adult Survey

254 participants (click here for a breakdown of the demographics)

Age
Over 30= 66.4 (91)
18-30= 29.9% (41)

Occupation
University 28.6% (40)
University Student 16.4 (23)
Government 16.4% (23)
NGO 10% (14)
Industry 5% (7)

Faith
Not Religious 72.3% (89)
Christian 12.2% (15)
Catholic 8% (10)
Other 4% (5)

Countries (19 total)
Canada 40.4% (55)
USA 25.7% (35)
UK 9.6% (13)
Brazil 1.5% (2)
Scotland 1.5% (2)
Netherlands 1.5% (2)
India 1.5% (2)
Mexico 1.5% (2)
Germany 1.5% (2)
France 1.5% (2)
Others (Include Australia, S. Korea, South Africa) 13.2% (18)