Team:TU-Delft/SynBioData

Wiki Interviews

Given that synthetic biology involves creating novel living organisms, social and ethical concerns are of primordial importance to address in order to insure the successful introduction of the technologies we are striving to create. While the largest part of our work is in the laboratory, many iGem teams have investigated the perception and concerns of a variety of people on social and ethical issues relating to synthetic biology. However, all these efforts are spread over the different teams, and there is no clear overview of these issues. One part of our human practices focuses on creating such a platform to better understand the place of synthetic biology in society. To that end, we created a tool that scanned interviews and communications to the public on existing iGem between 2008 and 2012.

Aim

Our main aims are:

1. To create a toolkit that retrieves interviews based on the keywords:
   1. ethics
   2. regulation
   3. safety
   4. synthetic
   5. other
2. To explore which topics where mostly discussed during the interviews as well as the background of the people participated in the interviews.In particular, we set up a number of a questions that we were able to answer.
   1. How many interviews talk about safety?
   2. How many interviews talk about regulation?
   3. How many interviews talk about ethics?
   4. What kind of people were interviewed?
   5. How many interviews were carried out per year?
3. To give further suggestions for future teams.

How did we do?

We created a simple web crawler written in C language. In that way, we browsed all Human Practice pages from the wikis sites during the period 2008 to 2012. If the word "interview/interviews" was detected, then an interview had been found! However, it has to be mentioned that there is a problem with this approach. If there is an interview in a wiki but it is not under human practice page or it is not stated as interview(but as "talk" for example), we fail to retrieve it.

After obtaining the interviews, we created a database containing:

1. The interview
2. The team that performed the interview
3. The person that was interviewed
4. background of the interviewed person
5. Year of the interview

Results and Suggestions

By performing a further analysis to the results obtained from our toolkit, we came to aforementioned conclusions(Figure 1) related to the topics discussed:

1. Most of the interviews focus on synthetic biology and biosafety issues (Figure 1).
2. There are different backgrounds of people interviewed, with the majority of them ( > 60%) to have a scientific background
3. The number of the interviews is increased almost year to year:
   1. 2008: 5%
   2. 2009: 18.1%
   3. 2010: 6%
   4. 2011: 31.9%
   5. 2011: 38.9%

Our suggestions for future teams based on the conclusions derived above would be:

1. More interviews should be taken related to regulations and ethics.
2. Even if there are enough interviews discussed about biosafety , this is an issue that has also to be addressed. To be more specific, there should be more interviews based on what the ideal rules for biosafety would be.
3. It would be nice, if interviews were performed to general public. In that way, people without scientific background can also be informed and may be interested in synthetic biology.

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