Answers to this multiple choice question were almost equally divided between ‘the bottom line of the work is correctly represented’, ‘important facts are often omitted hindering comprehension of the science behind’ and ‘the results and their implications are exaggerated’. Willy Verstraete added an extra answer to this question, being that the road to practical implementation is insufficiently depicted.

This was an open question. Several respondents are of opinion that next generation sequencing, “-omics” sciences, computational improvements and improved analytical methods in general were essential for the development that synthetic biology has so far been through.

This question lead to varying answers, probably dependent on their exact field of research. This suggests that a lot of different scientific developments are of great importance for all aspects of synthetic biology.

Some approached this open question in a scientific way, whereas others approached it in a societal way. According to most respondents (not all) synthetic biology will know a lot of improvements and breakthroughs during the next years. But also changes in society will occur, for example someone answered synthetic biology will lead to more governmental employees while another thinks there will be more and more resistance in Europe to exploit synthetic biology. We think the latter will indeed be the case if nothing is done as prevention for this to occur. It is clear from plant GMOs that once a negative public opinion is present it is hard to turn this around. Therefore in synthetic biology one should make sure the positive public opinion is already present before the negative influences come in. This, however, is far more easily said than done. This topic is also discussed on our ethics page.

Out of all the answers we made a word cloud, in which words that occur more are presented in a bigger font. Words besides the obvious ‘micro-organisms’ that come to the foreground in this cloud are…

• Biobased: This is not surprising, as all respondents were attending a debate about bio-based economy. It is however clear that bio-based economy is still expanding.
• Effective: During the next years techniques that are already used today will probably be optimized to become more effective.
• Creation, synthetic, artificial: Synthetic biology is actually all about creating new things. Creation of artificial cell life or creation of organisms that are more complex than the smallest bacterium were some of the answers. We put these three answers together because in a way they can be seen as being the same.
• Eukaryotic: Several respondents think that major improvements and breakthroughs will be made in synthetic biology for eukaryotes during the next years.
• Sustainable: The ultimate goal of synthetic biology is in many cases sustainability, mainly regarding to the ecological and economical aspects of it.

We present answers to this multiple choice question in a pie graph. It is clear that opinions on this topic are very divergent and answers cannot always be straightforward. Visit our ethics page to read more about it.

We asked to complete this sentence because we wanted to know how scientists think about what they are doing: do they see creating a novel entity as creating life or as creating a biological machine, or maybe something else? Well: 60% of respondents see it in the machine way and 13% as creating life. Other answers were:

• creating a platform to facilitate further research
• improving quality of life
• focussing the output
• not really creating, but accelerating evolution
• solving or trying to solve a problem that only a biological approach can
• modifying/altering a microorganism to be useful for human kind

Someone who answered ‘creating life’ remarked that this actually is the same as what breeding does in plant genetics.

Opinions on what can be called 'creating life' and what not are very divergent. This also became clear during the interviews we did with some professors. You can read more about this topic on our ethics page.

One third of respondents said they never do. We asked this question because it relates to our own project. We ourselves are convinced that the use of antibiotic resistance genes and antibiotics in scientific research is not the perfect way to go. The possibility of spreading the antibiotic resistance can never be entirely ruled out. Furthermore when the used antibiotics themselves are released into the environment, development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria can be accelerated. Given the already ruling difficulties and problems with antibiotic resistance in the environment we think this should be avoided as much as possible.

Three respondents answered that they did ever feel pressured to this extent. One other respondent remarked that he/she did only for subjective thresholds, e.g. for lag phase thresholds. On a total of 31 respondents this is not negligible. Lately cases were in the media of scientists “caught” on the manipulation or falsification of results in their research project. Publication pressure for scientists is not a good case for science itself if it causes false results to be published. This will probably keep being discussed in the future, especially if more of these cases become known.