Introduction

The use of MightyColi in the society does not raise too many questions: genetically modified microorganisms (GMM) are already used daily (and safely) in the pharmaceutical industry (1, 2).

However, we realized that few people were aware of that fact, and still mingled GMM with the GMO plants used in agriculture, which have a really bad reputation in western Europe. Although Mighty Coli would be welcomed without any problem in the industry, we feared that if, for some reason, we had to ask the authorization of the public to use Mighty Coli, we would only face fear, incomprehension, and eventually refusal. Since we firmly believe that the use of GMOs is an important ethical and societal issue, and that the general public should be included in the debate, we decided to organize several popularization events.

On the other hand, if we consider the biosecurity issues raised by our project, we can conclude that since Mighty Coli is only able to improve the production yield of a protein, the main issues that could be raised by Mighty Coli really depend on the chosen protein rather than Mighty Coli in itself. However, one could argue that a Mighty Coli bacterium that would somehow escape from a bioreactor would not be able to lose its ability to overproduce the chosen protein, which could lead to various the pollution of the environment depending of the chosen protein.

In conclusion, we choose to address two different issues in our human practice: the first is popularization and public awareness of GMOs and GMMS in particular; the second is the biosecurity measures that should be taken in order to use Mighty Coli responsibly.

Popularization events

After discussion within the team and with our friends and families, we decide that the themes of our popularization events would be the use of GMMs in research and industry (and the role that Mighty Coli could play in it), the means and perspectives of genetic manipulations and synthetic biology, the difference between GMMS and agricultural GMOs, and, given the opportunity, we would also discuss the pros and cons of agricultural GMOs, even if it is a bit off topic for Mighty Coli.

Since our perception of the public’s opinion about GMs and GMM were inherently biased by the few TV-reports and discussion we had had with our friends, we also decided to gather as much objective data as we could about the knowledge of the public in the area of the Biotechnology.

We settled on two types of popularization events: first, we would exacerbate the ludic dimension of the iGEM competition to take part in the Brussels Games Festival; then, we would prepare a presentation to give to science classes in several High Schools in Brussels.