Questionare

Synthetic biology is the design and construction of biological devices and systems. Synthetic biologists approach the creation of new biological systems from different perspectives, focusing on finding how life works or how to use it to benefit society. However, biosafety and biosecurity concerns are the understandable response to this new science and technology. Then we wanted to know the general public opinions on synthetic biology. Thus we did a survey among people aged 15 to 30 who will be the masters of the near future. We distributed 2,000 copies of the questionnaire through network , covering 19 provinces in China.

Our greatest concern was that whether the public is willing to improve our daily life through synthetic biology approaches.Here we got the following data:

More than half of them were in favor, but not quite sure whether synthetic biology can be beneficial. Next, we asked a question for further development, trying to find out public’s attitude when there is a product of synthetic biology in the market. It turned out that more people were on the sideline.

In order to find out people's concern for synthetic biology, we asked further questions in our survey.The data showed that people are worried about many aspects, focused on ethics, pollution of emissions to the environment and misuse of biological weapons. As for challenges, people pay much attention to two parts.One is the unknown function of many biological components and the other one is the stability of biological systems.

Since people have doubts, we want to find out which areas are more acceptable if synthetic biology is used to solve current problems.The answer turned out to be environmental management and treatment of disease.

For the limited sample size of our survey, the conclusion can not be so valid.So we will continue to collect data and refine our investigation. We hope to provide some inspiration of the development of synthetic biology and some clues for the choice of the public when synthetic biology is in the stage of application.