Team:Nevada/human practice

Helping Another Team

We helped the iGEM team from CU-Boulder by providing them with tobacco cell lines (NT-1 cells). We also gave directions for growth and transformation of the cells.

The Importance of Education

Our team's various human practice projects aimed to introduce our project and synthetic biology in general to the public. Because we believe many of the controversies and concerns involving synthetic biology stem from a lack of education and discussion, and because we believe scientific awareness should be spread to all age groups, we tried to reach out to a diverse range of people at various events and through various media.

Bill Nye The Science Guy Science Expo

On September 6th, Bill Nye The Science Guy came to the University of Nevada to give a talk, and the University decided to host a science fair before the event. All clubs, teams, and organizations related to science were invited to bring a cool demonstration for the public. In addition to this being the official unveiling of our public iRICE poster and answering questions about our project, we set up our vitamin catching game and taught the public (mostly little kids and their parents) how iRICE could, dare we say it, CHANGE THE WORLD!

The Vitamin Catching Game

In our pursuit to help the public understand our project in a fun and simple way, we created a game that demonstrates how iRICE allows for the binding of vitamins to rice. Using only simple household items (a swimming noodle, velcro ball catchers, and a few tennis balls), we have created a giant rice grain that can hold onto our vitamin tennis balls.

College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources Valley Road Field Day

On September 8th, Team Nevada presented their research to the public at the CABNR's Valley Road Field Day. Because this was a more family-oriented event, we had a kid-friendly interactive presentation in addition to our poster presentation. In order to teach children about cell biology and the roles of various organelles in the cell, we handed out "jello cells" and allowed the children to add their own "candy organelles" --after they learned the function of each organelle, of course.

A Survey of the Effects of Education on Attitudes Toward GM Rice and iRICE

One of our goals for our project was to see if people would be willing to eat iRICE. We decided to conduct a survey to get the public's opinions on iRICE as well as genetically modified rice. The format of the survey process began with basic demographic information and a quiz to see how much the person being surveyed knew about genetically modified golden rice. After this, participants were given an information sheet about Golden Rice, which contained basic scientific information as well as information about the pros and cons of golden rice. The rest of the questions were then about how comfortable participants would be eating golden rice, and whether or not they would prefer eating iRICE.

However, an interesting issue arose when we conducted our survey: regardless of how much people knew about golden rice originally, after learning more about it by reading our information sheet, almost all people were willing to eat GM rice. In fact, most of them even said they would prefer it to our iRICE supplement! We believe this reveals a greater problem at hand. People's attitudes toward genetically modified organisms are related (at least in part) to how informed they are. Although participants were given a full information sheet about golden rice, very little information about our project was on the survey --and their opinions reflected this. Our survey actually turned out to be more beneficial as a teaching tool than a survey, and hopefully will contribute to the idea that the public needs to be kept in the loop as science advances forward.

Click the previews below to view our survey and info sheet!