We took questionnaires from 100 people at our school festival.

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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.

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At Highschool

At high schools, after we gave them presentations and had brain storming, also took questionnaires.

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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

From our questionnaires, we got images for gene recombination from public.

Positive

1. Gene recombination is used for plant breeding.
2. This technology might have both merit and demerit.
3. It is useful for our livelihood.
4. Gene recombination is more useful than selective breeding because we can get improved phenotype immediately when we use this technology.

Negative

1. Released recombinant species could negatively affect the environment.
2. Gene recombination food may have bad effect on our health because snack food package often says “Non gene recombination”.

By results of our survey, we found some important facts that a lot of people still have prejudice for gene recombination and little correct knowledge for DNA or our field. We should improve such a present state. By our human practice activity, we might give people a chance to know what gene recombination is actually. Next year, iGEM will be 10 years old. By making use of this good opportunity, we would like a lot of people to come to know the gene recombination technology itself must not wrong or bad. In the same way as other common technologies, it’s the matter of how to use it. Succeeded in our endeavor, our activity and project was broadcasted in local TV program. This was so a big step for us to know our activity and iGEM broadly.

Our planning for future

To realize our view is that we continue our activity of human practice, getting popularity about iGEM, educating people for our field and discussing how to use technologies with them, to appeal to the mass media