Team:WHU-China/HumanPractice

GMOs and food safety

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become the focus of public attention for several years. Along with the flourish of biotechnology, there are more and more GMOs available for people. However, the disputes around this issue never subside. This year, since our project is strongly associated with GMOs or genetically modified food, we believed that people’s perception on GM food is essential to understand the prospect of modified bacterial product. Therefore, we decided to conduct a cross-sectional study in order to figure out to what extend people would accept consume GMO and bacterial product.

Introducing iGEM and synthetic biology to the public

In order to familiarize people, meanly college students with synthetic biology and iGEM, we joined the Wuhan Science Festival, and presented simply modified bacteria to give the public a brief impression on biotechnology.

GMOs and food safety

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become the focus of public attention for several years. Along with the flourish of biotechnology, there are more and more GMOs available for people. However, the disputes around this issue never subside. This year, since our project is strongly associated with GMOs or genetically modified food, we believed that people’s perception on GM food is essential to understand the prospect of modified bacterial product. Therefore, we decided to conduct a cross-sectional study in order to figure out to what extend people would accept consume GMO and bacterial product.

We handed out the questionnaires around campus in Wuhan University. Conducted after the enrollment of first-year students, the survey contains data from newly-coming students. We summarize and tabulate data by STATA. P-value was calculated and 95% confidence interval was chosen to see the factors contribute to different opinion on a specific issue.
Prior to the cross-sectional study, we think a pilot study is necessary, because no one in our team has the experience of doing survey in social science either did we get previous data as reference.
In the questionnaire, we designed two parts to investigate whether people hold negative attitude toward GMO and bacterial product. Considering consuming bacteria seems undesirable to people, we set a example of yogurt at the middle of the questionnaire to see if people can accept eating bacteria after thinking existing product available to everyone today.
In the pilot study, we handed out 217 questionnaires, and excluded 18 uncompleted ones. In the 199 samples we collected, sex and major were evenly distributed in the library where we handed out the questionnaire. However, students in high grade tended to study at library, while first and second-year students may choose to participate in social activities and face less pressure on entering graduate school.
Another problem emerged in this pilot is that our questionnaire was a little difficult for students to follow, meanly because of many choice-oriented questions. Many participants gave us advices on doing survey and designing questionnaire which contributed a lot to our final cross-sectional study.
Before the cross-sectional study, we refined our strategy and questionnaire:
Change some instructions in questionnaire to arrows at the end of each option, which orient them to the next question they are supposed to answer.
Change some open questions to close question making it easier for us to count.

As it is shown in figure 1, 2 and 3, the number of participants in different groups was still not evenly distributed, thus we decided to look into those data by grades, sexes and majors. Besides, the general result would be adjusted by different groups.


Figure 1: Distribution of participants by grade

Figure 2: Distribution of participants by sex

Figure 3: Distribution of participants by major
Grades: 1 for first year, 2 for second year, 3 for third year, 4 for fourth year, 5 for postgraduates Majors: 1 stands for art and history, 2 for social science, 3 for natural science, 4 for engineering, 5 for informatics and technology, 6 for medicine

There were some difference between grades upon attitude toward consumption of bacteria; however, it was not significant enough. No difference between sex, major and consumption of bacteria, respectively. See table 1, 2, 3.

Table 1: Analysis of variance for grade and consumption of bacteria, P-value>0.05, thus no significant difference

Table 2: Analysis of variance for sex and consumption of bacteria, P-value>>0.05.

Table 3: Analysis of variance for major and consumption of bacteria, P-value>>0.05

Since there was no significant difference between groups, we could conclude that the general result for people’s willingness to eat bacteria is: see table 4.

Table 4: 1 stands for Yes, 2 stands for No, 3 stands for it depends, 6 was a typing error.

We wanted to know whether people would change their mind if they were told that bacteria are normal in our surrounding and even on our table. For that purpose, we designed a leading question to remind participants that yogurt contains bacteria. The result shown that 26/73 students who chose NO changed their minds to YES after showing them the example of yogurt. 17/73 participants changed from NO to IT DEPENDS.

For people’s idea of GMOs, we measured general attitude toward GMOs, choice of food when shopping, and the knowledge about GMOs. There are differences between grades, result shown in table 5 and figure 4. High proportion of postgraduate students honestly chose “don’t know”, which shown by “0”. Besides, the proportion of postgraduates who thought GMOs were “very harmful” (shown by “1”) is higher than any other students. Many first-year students choose “9” which stands for very beneficial.

Table 5: Analysis of variance for attitude toward GMOs and grade

Figure 4: Distribution of score given by participants from different grades

However, we have to exclude grade from potential confounders before drawing the conclusion that grade is a factor for people to have difference ideas. According to the data analysis, seen table 6, students from different major were not evenly distributed in grades.

Table 6: Distribution of students by majors and grades

For students from various majors, there were difference between them, seen result at Table 7 and Figure 5.

Table 7: Analysis of variance for general attitude toward GMOs and major

Figure 5: Distribution of scores rated by participants from difference major.

For the relation between attitudes and sex, there was no association discovered.

When it comes to the attitude toward GMOs when shopping, complains about the overwhelming GM products in the market emerged in our survey. Most participants from different grade, major, gender agreed that there were so many GM foods in market that we cannot even avoid; but if someone gas got a chance to know it’s genetically modified, they would not buy it. What’s more, we discovered accordance between people’s general idea and people’s attitude when shopping. Most people opposed GMOs doing their best to avoid GMOs, while people holding neutral or positive opinions did not care much about whether they brought a GMO. See table 8 for more details.

Table 8: Distribution of people holding ideas when shopping and their general opinions

As for the knowledge of participants for GMOs, we designed multiple choices to know people’s idea of them except from the benefits of GMOs, such as increasing yield of product, etc. While, some participants realized the issue raised by GMOs, some other people were not very sure about them. See figures for details.

At the beginning of our survey, we were trying to find a validated questionnaire which would be comparable to our survey in Wuhan University. However, we didn’t find one, so we pre-tested the new questionnaire. Our pilot study revealed lots of problems we did not noticed before. Unfortunately, some problems were hard to control due to limit of time, unfamiliar with doing survey and irregular change of activities in camps. There problems appeared quite obvious on the result, limited participation, mistakes when entering the data and unexpected distribution of students from different background.

However, most of our results were not impacted by these problems according to our adjusted analysis in different groups (this process only shown when there are impacts). Therefore, our results of people’s perspectives toward GMOs are basically reliable and instructive. So far, we cannot address the question that either grades or major is a confounder for people’s ideas to GMOs due to the shortage of participants in certain major like medicine. Therefore, if given more time, we are able to figure that out.

The results of our survey show that students knew a lot than we had expected. Nevertheless, the uncertainty of GMOs still bothering people, maybe no one can give a right answer that to what extent they are acceptable in our market and on tables of ordinary people. It also provides us an idea that it is possible to counteract GMOs by GMOs. Can we look into the issue raised by genetic engineering via methods we used in synthetic biology? Can we create something to prevent problems caused by GMOs? We hope that more scientists as well as talented students will come with ideas to address our uncertainty about them.

Introducing iGEM and synthetic biology to the public