Team:Dundee/Outreach/Survey

Survey

A survey was created and was open to members of the public from July 25th to September 18th 2012. It received 107 responses from people with a wide range of backgrounds, including undergraduates, scientists and other members of the general public. The aim of this survey was to deduce the general degree of knowledge that members of the public have about synthetic biology and how open they are to it in their daily lives. Those who responded varied in age, with the biggest population (62.5%) being in the 17-25 age range category. There was a fairly even range of responses from male and female participants, with 57% being female and 43% being male. The questions asked in the survey were as follows:

Results

Public Awareness
Responses showed that participants have more awareness of genetic modification than they do of synthetic biology. This is unsurprising as "Genetic modification" is still the preferred term of the media. More than half of respondents claimed they had never heard of iGEM previous to participation in this survey, highlighting the need for publicity. Our team thought that this was extremely important and from the outset tried to engage with the public and as much as possible.

The final question of the survey was created to get the public thinking about our project specifically. 86% replied with the viewpoint that development of an oral/suppository tablet created through synthetic biology would be better treatment for C. difficile infection than current treatment strategies. This result is highly gratifying, seeing that this selection of people would be happy with the treatment that the team have been working towards this summer.