There has never been a large-scale survey in Israel about synthetic biology and genetic engineering. Therefore, our first step was to undertake a massive public opinion survey to learn about the current state of public opinion, and hopefully understand the roots of opposition to synthetic biology.

In the past few years, a number of public opinion surveys have been undertaken in various countries regarding new biological technologies, including synthetic biology. We based our survey on the strong, high-quality foundations of past efforts from across the world, including studies done in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and New Zealand.

Two questions must be asked before presenting the questionnaire and the results: Why bother conducting such a survey? And what did we intend to learn from it?

We wanted to canvass Israeli public opinion about synthetic biology because first of all, we couldn’t find any similar survey done in the past in Israel, and secondly, scientific progress tends to outpace public perception. We believe synthetic biology holds great potential for ecological, medical, and other projects, but nothing can be implemented without public support. For that to happen, we first need to understand how much people know about genetic engineering and synthetic biology, and what their concerns and thoughts are.

*Note: as the term "synthetic biology" is not very common, we added the term "genetic engineering" which is much more familiar, even though they are not completely equivalent.

The Questionnaire

Methods of distribution

The questionnaire was distributed from September 8th to September 24th, 2013, in the following ways:

1. 120 responses.
2. 50 responses.
3. Facebook link, distributed by team members and posted on several Israeli forums. => 711 responses. 13 out of them belong to "green" forums and are marked seperatly.

Results & Analysis

Our hypothesis is that the more people hear and learn about the world of genetic engineering and synthetic biology, the less they are concerned about it. The encounters with this field could be through an article in a newspaper, studying about it in school, talking about it with friends, watching a video on Youtube, etc. In our eyes, the negative public perception and uncertainty about biological developments has a lot to do with a lack of familiarity with the subject and a lack of participation in public discourse about it.

We present below the results most relevant to our hypothesis. The full report can be found here and contains many interesting graphs, which illustrate the differences between our religious responders to our secular ones, gender differences in attitudes, and more.

1. Have you ever heard of synthetic biology?