Human Practice Overview

Synthetic biology, the design and construction of new biological system not founded in nature is developing rapidly as a new branch of biotechnology, with many anticipated benefits and a high impact on society (Schmidt, 2010). The public, including bioethicists, media and venture companies always focus more on the result of a certain product, while most of the scientific workers pay more attention to science itself. Hence, a bridge connecting the two sides needs to be constructed. Our human practice strives to be the bridge to link the public and synthetic biology together.

We launched a Synthetic Biology Street Research on July 15th to know the general Chinese people’s awareness, understanding, interest and concern. As Tian’anmen and Wangfujing Street are most popular places of interests in Beijing, they are visited by oceans of tourists from different places of China. Hence, our pre-survey covered the whole China. According to the survey result, we divided BNU’s human practice into the following five parts.

Schmidt, M., Kelle, A., Ganguli-Mitra, A.& De Vriend, H. (2010) Synthetic biology. Springer Academic Publishing.

Survey Questions

The survey includes the effective answers of 338 Chinese citizens from 27 provincial areas and their ages vary from 10 to 40. These people can represent the new generation of Chinese.

1. Do you know biology? (您知道生物学这一学科么？)
   Yes(是)-305 No(否)-23
2. Do you know what synthetic biology is? (您知道什么是合成生物学么？)
   Yes(是)-20 No(否)-295
3. What science subject has the greatest effect on our daily life? (你觉得自然科学中哪一门学科对我们当今的生活影响最大？)
   Math(数学)-53 Physics(物理)-67 Chemistry(化学)-68 Biology(生物)-136 Others(其它)-14
4. What aspect of biology do you pay the most attention to?(你最关心生物的哪一方面？）
   Environment effect(环境影响)-164 Efficiency of a product(效率)-35 Economic of a product(103) Others(其它)-13
   
   

   Fig1: About 90.24% of the new generation Chinese people between 10 and 40 know biology, but in the only 20 out of the 305 surveyed people know synthetic biology, which only makes up 6.78%.

   

   Fig 2: 40.24% of the new generation Chinese regard biology as the most important subject to our daily life.

   

   Fig 3: 53.77% of the new generation Chinese people concern environment effects. 11.48% care efficiency of a certain product. 33.77% regard economic issue as the most important thing.

The Story of E.coli Prometheus

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