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Human Practices

For the human practices component of our project, we worked to gain more knowledge about the professional, industrial, and public’s perception of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and aimed to create a marketing strategy for a Genetically Modified Yogurt. This particular approach was chosen for our project due to the consumer-based nature of our final product. We first obtained general knowledge about the common perspectives toward GMOs through interviewing various industry and academic professionals in the dairy industry and associated academic fields to understand the major struggles and concerns when dealing with GMOs in the dairy industry. The industry and academic professionals we worked with include individuals with backgrounds in Philosophy, Bioethics, Biology, Microbiology, Genetics, Engineering, Land and Food Systems, and several other fields that are not directly involved with the issue of genetic modification. We then designed a public survey according to the feedback we obtained from the interviews to gather the opinions of the general public. The public survey bettered our understanding about the major concerns that citizens have with regards to consuming Genetically Modified foods, and in our case, yogurt. Through the public survey, we obtained preliminary data needed to develop a marketing strategy outline for our GM yogurt.

At the same time, we researched human practices’ concerns surrounding CRISPR bacterial immunity. Due to recent discoveries with regards to the CRISPR system and scientific advances made in this field, we concluded that creating a Spacer Repository would be beneficial in assessing the potentially unintended implications of these sequences. We developed a submission sample and included the information that would be necessary in the repository.

Genetically Modified Yogurt