Team:British Columbia/humanpractices

From 2013.igem.org

(Difference between revisions)
Line 8: Line 8:
   var GATHERINFO = "We began by aiming to gain a better understanding of the factors we needed to consider in our public survey. To achieve this, we chose to interview industry professionals and academics with backgrounds in Genetically Modified Organisms, the Dairy Industry, Food and Nutrition, Marketing, and Ethics.";
   var GATHERINFO = "We began by aiming to gain a better understanding of the factors we needed to consider in our public survey. To achieve this, we chose to interview industry professionals and academics with backgrounds in Genetically Modified Organisms, the Dairy Industry, Food and Nutrition, Marketing, and Ethics.";
-
   var INDUSTRY = "Through interviewing industry professionals, we gained a better understanding of their needs, concerns, interactions between farmers, suppliers and consumers and their opinions on genetically modified organisms. Some individuals interviewed also offered suggestions regarding the marketing strategy for dairy products. <b>Click to view the interview questions.</b>";
+
   var INDUSTRY = "Through interviewing industry professionals, we gained a better understanding of their needs, concerns, interactions between farmers, suppliers and consumers and their opinions on genetically modified organisms. Some individuals interviewed also offered suggestions regarding the marketing strategy for dairy products. <b>Click to view the interview questions and watch the documentary..</b>";
-
   var ACADEMIC = "In choosing the academic professionals, we selected our interviewees to be individuals whose opinions were expected to be biased according to their academic background. Professors in Land and Food Systems, Ethics and Philosophy, and Microbiology who have studied genetically modified organisms were asked to participate in our professional interview. Their responses opened our eyes to factors that we had not considered previously.<b>Click to view the interview questions.</b>";
+
   var ACADEMIC = "In choosing the academic professionals, we selected our interviewees to be individuals whose opinions were expected to be biased according to their academic background. Professors in Land and Food Systems, Ethics and Philosophy, and Microbiology who have studied genetically modified organisms were asked to participate in our professional interview. Their responses opened our eyes to factors that we had not considered previously.<b>Click to view the interview questions and watch the documentary.</b>";
   var MARKETINGPROFS = "We spoke with two marketing professors, Tim Silk and Joey Hoegg and discussed our human practices mission statement. They assisted us in considering all of the marketing aspects of our project and helped us in developing our professional interviews with various other professors. After the academic interviews, having gained some perspective about the opinions individuals may express, we sat down with two marketing professors to lay down the basics of a public questionnaire. ";
   var MARKETINGPROFS = "We spoke with two marketing professors, Tim Silk and Joey Hoegg and discussed our human practices mission statement. They assisted us in considering all of the marketing aspects of our project and helped us in developing our professional interviews with various other professors. After the academic interviews, having gained some perspective about the opinions individuals may express, we sat down with two marketing professors to lay down the basics of a public questionnaire. ";
   var DEVSURVEY = "We developed a survey composed of three sections: General yogurt purchasing habits such as price, size, and consumer use, Factors that buyers consider when making yogurt purchase and What factors individuals would consider in choosing to buy a genetically modified yogurt as opposed to a non modified yogurt.Through our industry and academic interviews, we isolated five motivators to test: Health Benefit, Health Hazards, Ecological Impact, Price, and Taste.<b>Click to view the survey.</b>";
   var DEVSURVEY = "We developed a survey composed of three sections: General yogurt purchasing habits such as price, size, and consumer use, Factors that buyers consider when making yogurt purchase and What factors individuals would consider in choosing to buy a genetically modified yogurt as opposed to a non modified yogurt.Through our industry and academic interviews, we isolated five motivators to test: Health Benefit, Health Hazards, Ecological Impact, Price, and Taste.<b>Click to view the survey.</b>";

Revision as of 03:58, 28 September 2013

iGEM Home

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 below and included the information that would be necessary in the repository.

Genetically Modified Yogurt

Roll over parts of the flow chart to read more!