Know your enemy; improving public awareness of biosciences

• Summary
• Advantages and Limitations

Advantages and limitations of the methods used

Description of the advantages and limitations

Online survey / public perception analysis:

Advantages

• An online survey allows the investigator to collect primary information from a broader audience than physical surveys. The survey was not limited by a physical location. Any university student that had access to internet was able to perform this risk analysis. The fact that the survey was online, allowed a wider spread of the survey.

• An online survey only cost is the paid membership, which allows the investigator to ask more than ten questions. All other costs, like transportation and pollsters’ wages, are not incurred.

• Information is stored in an online database that facilitates the tabulation and analysis method. Compared to physical surveys, the process of transcribing information from the physical polls to the computer is skipped.

• A public perception analysis allowed us to use the data gathered to determine significant statistical differences between the studied groups.

Limitations

• The lack of a personal contact increased the number of incomplete surveys.

• Time required for completing the surveys proved was 10 minutes approximately.

How did we manage these limitations?

Having one of the team members to be from the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) played an essential role for the public perception analysis. He contacted more than 500 undergraduate students from different majors of his and other universities. In Zamorano, being a boarding university where all of its students live inside of its campus, the team was able to use the internal email, social media and visited the classrooms to invite the students to fill out the survey. After one month of gathering information, almost 360 surveys were completed from which 301 were filled out correctly.

Educational practices

Advantages

• The practices performed were simple and easy to organize; not needing many preparations. This means they do not consume much time to prepare them.

• Most of the instruments used in the practices were donated by the university. Extremely low costs of developing.

• The didactic and fun methods used entertained more the students, maintaining their concentration in the topics explained for a longer period of time. This is useful, especially since many of the topics are hard and tedious to explain.

Limitations

• The proposed synthetic biology work module needed to fulfill the laws established by the Honduran regulation. A syllabus was made that for this sole purpose, but it took a considerable amount of time to gather information from other universities to make it.

• Before elaborating and implementing a synthetic biology work module, we had to fulfill the laws established by the Honduran regulation. We needed to get the approval of the National Committee for Biotechnology and Biosafety. This took more time than the expected.

How did we manage these limitations?
We contacted the professors in Zamorano that personally know the people in charge of the National Committee for Biosecurity and Biosafety. This helped us in a great way as our professors invited them to visit us so we could present them our project and the Risk Assessment we developed for the E. zamofordi bacterium. After it, they analyzed our work and gave their approval. It took a lot of time what the wait was worth it.

Latin American ERA guide

Advantages

The Latin America ERA guide offers an easier alternative to perform coherent risk assessments than the one proposed by the Cartagena protocol. It is more understandable and less stressful.

The guide provides a very detailed step by step guide on what to do to perform a coherent risk assessment, taking into account all the hazards that have a logical causal relation. Unlike the one proposed by the Cartagena Protocol, the Latin America ERA guide is more explicit on what should be done.

The guide was designed and written in a simple way; so that inexperience people, like undergraduates, are able to perform risk assessment.

The Latin America ERA guide counts with more didactic graphics than the ERA guide proposed by the Cartagena Protocol.

Limitations

• The lack of a guide that backed us up in the risk assessment of a synthetic organism slowed down the assessment. We had to adapt our work from a genetically modified organism (GMO) guide to SynBio organism without the help of a specialist.

• The guide was made by 14 expert scientists specially to be used for Latin America.

How did we manage these limitations?
Even though there isn’t a specific guide for risk assessment in SynBio, the ERA guide proved to be very simple and user-friendly; it was easy to adapt it to develop our Risk Assessment of the E. Zamofordi bacterium. We had the support of our instructors and the recommendations of the National Committee for Biosecurity and Biosafety through the elaboration of the Risk Assessment in order to develop a solid and consistent document.

Even though that the guide is especially developed for its use in Latin America, our project demonstrates that it could be adapted to any country around the world as it sets the basics to develop a Risk Assessment for SynBio practices.

How can our methods be applied by future iGEM teams?

We aim to promote our project as a tool to highlight the role that education plays in the development of synthetic biology. Our project will serve as a source of information to conduct further analysis about the impact that educations has in synthetic biology acceptance. It will also be useful to analyze differences of awareness and acceptance between countries.

Our objective is to promote research in human practices relating synthetic biology development, being humans the main component of the system. We want to increase the number of teams interested in human practices. This is because if we don’t care about what people think, learn and accept, all the technological development that we make might not have the expected acceptance.

The risk assessment guide that we followed to conduct our risk assessment, is innovative and practical. The procedure could be followed by other iGEM teams in the future, especially Latin American teams that perform modifications in the genome of a bacterium. This tool will also serve as a base to conduct future risk assessments for synthetic organisms in Honduras. Finally, the educational model that we propose will serve as base to implement synthetic biology related topics in Universities who hadn’t had it yet.