Survey
Our team has written and sent out two online surveys (one written for high school students, another written for non high school students). The purpose of this study is to better understand the level of knowledge the participants have about the emerging field of synthetic biology, what they feel the future of synthetic biology holds, what implications of advances in synthetic biology may be and what the framework of governance for synthetic biology should be.
To start somewhere, we sent the link to our survey to 130 different people who were asked to send the link through their networks. It was hoped that we would reach in this way diverse people who are linked to government agencies, industries, Universities, NGO’s and are from the general public. By doing so, we have received a broad spectrum of responses rich in diversity and perspectives. We also sent out a link specific for iGEM participants in the hope that we can showcase what the thoughts of iGEM participants are
The survey for high-school participants takes in account their level of knowledge and background in biology, technology, ethics and society. The high school survey contains more examples of current products and applications of synthetic biology at present. However, in doing so, we put much attention in making sure that the examples do not bias the understanding and thus the answers to our survey.
As of July 31, 2008 we received 206 responses for the non-high school survey and 49 responses for the high school survey. We are also anticipating survey responses from participants of the iGEM 2008 (as of July 31, 2008 we have 30 responses).
Presentations
As an extension to our survey, our team also met with a group of high school students after they took our survey to provide answers to any further questions they had regarding our project, survey or the synthetic biology field itself. We also had a PowerPoint presentation that gave them a thorough understanding of the field and encouraged a debate on its implications.
Collaboration
Our team is also collaborating with the Guelph iGEM team 2008 by assisting them in writing a feasibility studies on their project where we cover the E3LS issues and we provide also E3LS feedback to the wetlab team from Calgary.
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