Team:SCAU-China/Questionnaire

The SCAU iGEM team has conducted a questionnaire survey through the Internet by the questionnaire star (http://www.sojump.com/) to gather the information of public awareness of synthetic biology and MFC as well as the public attitude to the biological energy.
The questionnaire is a bilingual version (Chinese and English). Up to 3rd October, we have received 151 questionnaires (15 in English, 136 in Chinese). The following data are the statistics of questionnaires.

1. Most of the respondents who took this survey have bachelor or higher degrees.

2. About 3/5 people who took this survey have heard about iGEM before, and one quarter of people pays close attention to it. However, there are 2/5 of people who do not know. When talking about the benefits of life science, most people choose human health care, approximately number of people chooses the food production and environmental protection options, and few people associate it with economic benefits.

3. From this survey, we find that most people concern about the global energy consumption, and about half are worried about it. When talking about their attitude towards new energy, 3/4 of people strongly support to develop new energy, but about 16% of people they are indifferent to this issue.

4. Over 95% of people have ever heard about biological energy source, and about 60% of people have certain knowledge about biological energy source. The most common biological energy resources they think have entered in people’s life is biogas, and the latter is biodiesels.

5. 3/4 of people who know MFC, they know that MFC is a bio-electrochemical device that generates electricity from the bioenergy that comes from microorganisms’ fermentation. And another question shows that almost 10% of people think MFC negatively because of its high cost of development.

6. When talking about the applications of MFC in the future, most people think it will be a new form of clean energy, about 50% thinks that it can be a seawater desalination device. If the MFC launches the market, over 40% of people think they worry about the microbial mutation, produce infectious pathogens. About 20% of people concern that the capacity is not stable for supply.

7. When asking for their suggestions on bio-energy exploitation, they think it is a good project for humans. And they also think that we should take serious consideration of biosafety.
8. The questionnaire survey we did almost involve the people all over China.

Conclusion

We can draw a conclusion from the survey that the public generally supports the development of environmental friendly energy source. With great concern of energy issue all over the world, most people showed their attention about applications of new energy. However, when considering biosafety issue, as one of the new energy sources, more than half of them worried about side effects of microorganisms to environment and human health. This result can in some extend account for the restricted development of Microbial Fuel Cells in China. Therefore, unveiling detailed laws and policy for standardization of microbial energy industry, for safety restrictions, is urgent to relieve public misunderstanding of biosafety issue in bio-industry. Furthermore, scientific knowledge spreading and safety issue propagating are also significant to raise public awareness of new energy source development. So, we also conducted several relevant outreaches.

Our questionnaire link:
1、 Chinese version: http://www.sojump.com/jq/3749153.aspx
2、 English version: http://www.sojump.com/jq/3749447.aspx