Survey

Our survey contains questions about the ethical issues surrounding heavy metal contamination and our project. We wanted to reach a mixed public in order to obtain an idea of the Chinese public opinion on the ethical issues of heavy metal contamination and our project. We did an online survey among family, friends, teachers, secondary school pupils and our fellow students.

Results

The survey was opened from 26-08-2014 to 30-08-2014 (5 days) and was completed by 185 respondents, including 93 male and 92 female. The educational level of the respondents was mixed. The result shows that different educational groups are all represented (Figure 1). There is a bias to the educational level of an undergraduate. Actually, the survey is not a completely representative sample of the Chinese population. However, it still has a good suggestion for the opinion of Chinese public. In general, higher educational level and younger people, who also usually pay much attention to the environmental pollution issues, are more open towards using biological method than less educated and older people.

Figure 1: Educational level and age group of the respondents of the ethical survey of the iGEM team NEFU_China 2014

Figure 2. The basic knowledge of heavy metal contamination according to the respondents

The results show that most people consider that the heavy metal pollution become more and more serious in our daily life, and lead, as one of the most widely used heavy metals in industrial production, is considered as the greatest threatening with people. Moreover, some people point out cadmium and mercury are most hazardous to the environment. However, although heavy metal pollution is realized by most people, only 4% of the respondents know how to recycle these metals very well, and there are still 39% respondents having no idea about the metal recycling. Among the different treatments, most respondents think that biological approach is the best way to handle the heavy metal pollution. In conclusion, people have already realized the threats of heavy metals, and most of them would like to deal with these ions by using biological method.

Figure 3. Basic knowledge of cadmium contamination and application of nanocrystal according to the respondents

It can be observed from the Figure 3 that most people are aware of Itai-Itai disease, triggered by cadmium poisoning. However, 28.65% respondents still have never heard of this kind of disease. When thinking about the issue of detection of the cadmium ions, people tend to give a higher priority to the option of high sensitivity and easy to detect compared with the option of low cost and convenient to carry the instrument. Just as it shows in figure 2 that the majority of respondents deem the biological approach as the best way to handle heavy metal pollution, most respondents agree with the statement that utilizing biological method to treat cadmium pollution. In our project, we recycle the heavy metal cadmium by forming nanocrystal, while the survey indicates that only a small portion of respondents are conscious about the application of nanocrystal very well and there are still 68% respondents having no idea about it. In conclusion, people have already realized the threats of cadmium, and most of them would like to utilize biological method to cope with this problem. But they have less awareness of the application of nanocrystal formed by cadmium and sulfer.

Figure 4: This figure shows the most concerned ethical issues caused by implementing biological treatment according to our respondents.

As it shows in Figure 4, about 39% people think that biological safety problem is the biggest barrier for biological treatment application. Moreover, 35% respondents think that we still lack the related technology for cadmium pollution treatment by using biological methods. However, people pay less attention to the high expense and low efficacy problems the biological methods may cause. The results reveal that people wanted a safe biological method to treat the cadmium pollution, and established the treating process. And that is what we do in our project.

Figure 5. Respondent’s attitude toward the feasibility of detecting and recycling cadmium ions at the same time

From this pie chart, we can clearly notice that most people have a higher preference to the viability of doing these things simultaneously, almost taking up 66% of the respondents, despite that their reasons may be varied. Undeniably, there is still 34% of the total having no faith in it, considering that we may still have technological difficulties contemporary and engineered strains may generate secondary contamination.

Conclusion

The results of our survey suggest that in general people in China are conscious of the seriousness of the heavy metal pollution and have a general understanding of the recycling of them. However, most people do not take it into consideration that the cadmium is the most threatening heavy metal and may has negative effects on their health and life. Moreover, more than half of the respondents have a limited knowledge of or even have no idea about Itai-Itai disease caused by cadmium poisoning. To our surprise that most respondents give a higher priority to apply the biological approach to deal with the contamination, despite most of them are worried about the biological safety issues. Also the majority thinks it lacking related technology to use biological approaches in a possible application. Besides, most respondents hold that it is plausible to detect and recycle cadmium concurrently. We do hope that our project is meaningful, letting an increasing number of people become aware of the hazard of cadmium pollution and its biological treatment.