Team:NRP-UEA-Norwich/HP Ethics

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NRP UEA Norwich iGEM 2014

Ethics of Public Consultation

This years NRP-UEA iGEM 2014 team has taken the ethical approach to our project very seriously, we have followed the robust ethical procedures for the University of East Anglia as if our biosensor product was to be taken to market and developed, rather than a 10 week project.

What ethical questions and concerns did we consider in relation to the Green Canary iGEM project?

  • Is it safe to use a genetically modified plant sentinel in amidst non GM crop plants?
  • How can food sustainability be achieved?
  • What do the public think about the above matters?
  • Do young people understand what the global food crisis is and methods used to tackle this important issue?

How did we address the ethical concerns raised by our project?

We wished to address the above questions through research and extensive public engagement. Our qualitative approach to public engagement meant that we undertook a multi-step process to ensure opinions were conveyed accurately and without bias. We sought ethics approval prior to public engagement to ensure that our research and data gathering was in accordance to the ethics regulations of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. This is a lengthy process; however it highlighted to us many issues, such as not asking leading questions. Our method included an initial outreach event titled ‘Food for Thought’ at The Cut Arts Centre, Halesworth, Suffolk, UK, where we gathered comments made by visitors, pertaining to the above questions and had discussions and demonstrations. The comments were used to generate topics of discussion for focus groups held in secondary schools with participants aged 14-15. Informed consent was gathered during all discussion events as approved by Mark Wilkinson Deputy of the ethics committee at UEA. During the focus groups, notes were taken to highlight points raised and how the discussion developed. The Anglia Farmer magazine ran an article on our project and helped us to advertise for our focus groups, survey and follow up event at the Cut. Furthermore, running an article in this specific magazine allowed details of our project to access those that it would predominantly effect (farmers).

How would we further address the ethical issues of our project in the future?

With more time, the next steps would be to run more focus groups with a wider age range, and use the key issues raised to generate a survey for online distribution to gain a wider range of opinions on specific questions. A follow-up event at the Cut Arts Centre was also run to facilitate a more in-depth discussion in a ‘Science Café’ style debate on the topics surrounding our project. From this we gained a wider range of opinion and concern on issues surrounding our project. This event was a great success with a good turn out and in-depth discussion, and ‘The Cut’ will continue to run these types of events in the future.

Further to this process, we ran workshops at local schools to raise awareness to young people of secondary school age about the global food crisis and discuss with them what they believe should be done. This is a particularly important aspect of our human practices as this is the generation that genetically modified crops will affect the most. It has also been shown that young people are the most excluded from surveys pertaining to major world decision and opinion, even though they are those that will be affected. Furthermore, school outreach is particularly important as many young people attending schools in rural Norfolk are from deprived communities with low university progress rates. Finally, many of these young people come from farming communities and agricultural research could be part of their future. Our approach included following appropriate and proper protocols for gaining ethics approval for outreach and data gathering purposes. This approach influenced our project in the sense that it allowed us to direct our outreach accordingly and the learning process of ethical approval has made us aware of the implications and sensitivity of human data collection. Data gathered from the completion of our survey and data gathering processes will influence the manner by which our scientific research project would develop in the future.

We have now set the foundation for the process of ethics approval for future NRP-UEA-Norwich iGEM teams, and also other teams across the world. We suggest that iGEM could consider setting in place more guidelines for ethics in the future, in order that this process might be regulated for all teams seeking to gather data from opinions, or in research that affects humans in any capacity. Specifically, we suggest that iGEM should consider putting in place Check-ins for ethics approaches in iGEM teams. Such procedures could follow guidelines established for Check-in of safety practices in iGEM projects in 2014, and would aim to ensure that all teams are aware of at least the minimum criteria for responsibilities in data gathering and in ethics research.

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