Team:HokkaidoU Japan/Survey

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Human Practice

Survey

At University Festival

We took questionnaires from 100 people at our school festival.

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Results

The main respondents were children to high school or university students and their parents in our experiment.

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Unfortunately, iGEM seemed to be little known to citizen in Hokkaido. Over half respondents had negative views of gene recombination. With help of our presentation, most of respondents could understand what DNA is.
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Observations

  1. iGEM is little known by citizens.
  2. Next year, iGEM will be 10 years old. By making use of this good opportunity, we want to make iGEM better known. We want people to know what iGEM is. In order to this, it needs to appeal to the mass media.
  3. A lot of people have prejudice for gene recombination. However, the technology of gene recombination itself is not wrong. In common with other technologies, it’s the matter how to use it. After educating the people, we should discuss how to use it.
  4. By human practice we changed people opinions. We didn’t know whether we can change their minds, nevertheless we found gradual information transmission important.

At Highschool

High school students no more knew about iGEM than citizens. We should act to make iGEM famous.

All students were interested in iGEM and synthetic biology. There may be students who were attracted to research activities

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we found that more than half of students had positive view on gene recombination, but one third of students viewed it negatively.

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To our delight, when we visited high schools, all of the students showed interests for synthetic biology. Nevertheless they no more knew about iGEM than citizen, some students seemed to be attracted to research activities and iGEM.

Observation

Image of gene recombination.
  1. Gene recombination is used for plant breeding.
  2. Released recombinant species could negatively affect the environment.
  3. It is useful for our livelihood.
  4. Genetically modified food can harm our health.
  5. This technology might have both merit and demerit.
  6. Using this technology, we can gain strong plants. However, its safety may not be enough.
  7. Snack food packages often say “Non gene modified.” Because of that, I thought gene recombined foods damage our health.
  8. Gene recombination is more useful than selective breeding, because we can gain improved phenotype immediately when we use the technology.