Recent reports show that the public interest in vegan diets is on the rise [1]. Indeed, if more people forwent consuming beef and dairy products, methane emissions caused by livestock farming could be drastically reduced. In order to get further insight into the public’s willingness to change their diet for the sake of the climate we conducted a survey - before the revelation of our project, so that they would not be influenced. The exact question was: “Could you imagine changing your nutrition such that there are no more dairy or beef products on the menu to reduce the output of greenhouse gases?” The results are shown in the diagram at the left.
Even confronted with the possible consequences of their consume of dairy and beef products, most people were not willing to change their nutrition for a better climate. Additionally, it should be considered that clicking “Yes” in a survey is probably much easier than turning something into action for real, so in reality the “No” fraction would probably even more numerous. This implements that there should be another way of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions caused by livestock, and with our project we want to show how this could be achieved.

We also wanted to figure out what the public expects synthetic biology to contribute to society and in which areas that synthetic biology is applied in they wish the most for progress. Among these areas are medicine, renewable energy, environment, and nutrition. To those who were not familiar with the term “synthetic biology” we gave a short introduction, of course without influencing their opinion. The question was: “In which of the areas where synthetic biology is applied do you wish for progress?” Apparently most people are interested in the use of synthetic biology for medicinal or environmental purposes, whereas less wanted synthetic biology to solve problems concerning renewable energy and the least wanted synthetic biology to interfere in nutritional issues. The results for nutrition and renewable energy were somewhat expected - genetically modified food is a hotly debated topic in Germany and renewable energy may be a somewhat intangible term, especially as the connection to synthetic biology is probably not as obvious as for the other areas.
On the other hand, we were quite surprised to find that people obviously cared about the environment as much as about medicinal issues. However, it would sure be interesting to see whether the age group has an influence on what the respective persons chose. Therefore, we also asked for the persons’ ages and got the following results. Especially for environment and medicine it is interesting to see that persons younger than 40 years and persons of 40 years or older seem to form two distinct groups with equally distinct opinions. While the younger ones decided for environment more often, the opposite is the case for the older ones who are more interested in the use of synthetic biology for medicine. Although these differences might not be significant one can still assume that the age influences a person’s priorities. Preservation is a relatively new issue which might explain that younger ones seem to be more interested in it. This is probably not to the same degree the case for older people who instead wish for progress in more conventional areas like medicine, which also have a more direct influence on humans.
In general, however, there is a discrepancy of opinions. On the one hand, many people want to preserve the environment, but on the other hand, only few would be willing to change their diets in order to achieve this.