Team:UNAM-Genomics Mexico/Safety

Human Practice section: The Synthetic Conquest of Mexico.

Objective.- Create a solid opinion about synthetic biology in Mexico, so that it can be exploited best for the country's needs.

Communicate and Conquer

We will soon meet the time when the advance on Synthetic Biology (SB) will touch the everyday life of the world population, as has happened with other technologies on which nowadays we have an apparent dependence, like the internet. However, nobody warned us about the magnitude of the impact such technologies could have upon our society and our decisions. For synthetic biology, if it is desired to change people's lives, it becomes part of the revolution, as well as a responsibility, to:

• extend and diffuse its concept in practical terms for non-science-oriented people to deal with,
• achieve that individuals understand the concept, the potential benefits, and potential risks of SB,
• foment the creation of well founded individual opinions towards the topic.

These musts will be the objectives to follow in our human practice: The Synthetic Conquest of Mexico, Part I”.

Strategy

Since it was impossible to cover the whole range of individuals in Mexico in a statically representative way, we decided to address high school students from the central part of Mexico. High school is a key moment for decisions in life; a moment in which we are open to different conceptions for we have to chose ours. Informing the youth is the first seed in the strategy to inform entire families.

In order to set grounds for the completion of the Synthetic Conquest of Mexico, the strategy we designed consisted of three simple steps:

• evaluate what people understand from the SB concept as a first impression (survey 1)
• give a dynamic lecture on SB which can inform even people with no background in biology, with emphasis on:
  • how biology can be engineered
  • how biomachines could change our lives in the near future
  • evaluate what people understand from the SB concept after the talk and when they think it will start changing our lives (survey 2).

A practical definition for Synthetic biology

People of the general public might not care about restriction sites, PoPS and copy number of plasmids; instead, they might want to know a general and practical idea of the implications of engineering biology, which involves “using engineering principles to assemble parts into biomachines in living organisms, to achieve a specific goal for human benefit”. Though we know this definition of synthetic biology is by no means representative of the whole field, it gives people a mental image which they can communicate to others and express their opinion about.

Hypothesis

If significantly more people get close to our “practical definition” of SB after the talk than before it, our talk is an effective mechanism to communicate the concept of SB (objective b described above).

Survey 1

What does Survey 1 evaluate?

Survey 1, or the preliminary survey, is based on 4 questions:

• What do you understand by “synthetic”?

Question 1 sets the ground for the concept, since the understanding of the term “synthetic” will significantly influence the concept of SB. Expected categories are “artificial/manmade, summarized, or related to materials, like plastic.

• What do you think Synthetic Biology is?

Question 2 asks directly for the concept. A bit unexpected, this question challenges the survey taker to merge life with synthetic. Here we don't have many expectations, perhaps except for artificial life. This question will be directly compared to Question 1 from Survey 2.

• Do you think it is possible to transform a living being (i.e. Bacterium) in a “biomachine” to solve human problems?

This question, without directly referring to synthetic biology, encounters the reader with the advance being made in the field and a direct application of it. It lets us know about previous information the taker may have about general biotechnology.

• What kinds of problems do you think that could be solved?

This question makes the taker think about human needs or problems that haven't been successfully addressed by now. Prioritization of “needs” gives us information about the personal need of the individual; namely, it is important to draw a line between the first need an the second one, more carefully thought about. It also lets us know about the future acceptance of SB by the individual given that the problem solved is related to his view of a “need” (therefore, main fields of opportunity for SB).

Assumptions in Survey 1

• The reader will start from the first question downward.
• There is no influence from surrounding takers.
• The answers reflect a permanent point of view of the taker.(i.e. Not influenced by mood or other external factors)
• The survey is unbiased since the taker doesn't have choices to select from.

Survey 2

What does survey 2 evaluate?

It evaluates the final conception and opinion about SB and the talk It will help us know whether our talk was helpful in providing a working definition for SB to the audience.

Survey 2 is based on four questions:

• What did you understand by synthetic biology?

This question is the first hit to know if Synthetic Conquest of Mexico mission has achieved the principal objective. We expect differential results compared whit the preliminary survey, trying to get our point to people of the concept of synthetic biology as bioingeneering. This question unlike comparable question in survey 1, if concept is far from the main idea it will be classified as other.

• Select the option that best suits your vision about engineering living organisms.
  • Nowadays it is possible to engineer living organisms
  • Nowadays it is not possible to engineer living organisms
  • Other

For this question we expect to know if people got the reality of current synthetic biology whit available tools and techniques.

• Do you think synthetic biology will change our lives in the upcoming years?
  • Yes, in ___ years.
  • No.

Once proven if Synthetic Conquest of Mexico has put the first step in minds of students, we want to know if they feel tangible the reality of synthetic biology in their current of future life. The option to put years probably shows the impact or reasonability of our presentation.

• Do you support the advancement of synthetic biology? Mention your opinion with positive and/or negative points.

Going deeper in the minds of students, we try to investigate if personal, objective and maybe religious ideas, supports or impede the development of Synthetic Biology in Mexico and World. The purpose to put positive and/or negative points we now if students got the knowledge of potential and limitations about synthetic biology.

• Write down any comments you have about the lecture or topic.

Here we expect to know if they found interesting, boring, shocking, boring, etc… the lecture. This question covers the performance of lecturer and opinion about lecture.

Assumptions in survey 2

• The reader will start from the first question downward.
• There is no influence from surrounding takers.
• The answers reflect a permanent point of view of the taker. (i.e. Takers are not influenced by mood or other external factors)
• The survey is unbiased since the taker doesn't have choices to select from.
• Most people heard lecture.

Quick Human Practice Stats

• 470 high school students reached by SB
• 402 students persuaded to support SB
• 188 students successfully related SB to biological engineering
• 329 students expecting SB to change our lives within 10 years

Data sources and handling

5 schools from the central part of Mexico (3 in Mexico City and 2 in León, Guanajuato) were chosen and allowed us to give our Human Practice talk. Only 5 schools were considered so that survey processing was feasible, due to the need for an unbiased analysis (open question categorization and 2 surveys per participant). We didn't have an option to decide the school year or other characteristics of our audience. Most schools decided that students from the last year of high school, already specializing in vocational areas of Physics-Math or Biology-Chemistry, should listen to this conference though our objective was to reach al three years of high school. A total of 470 students from the 5 schools participated in the activity, and a main body of 446 students that participated in all three sections was considered for the analysis. These students answered Survey 1, listened to the talk, and answered survey 2 afterwards.

Any survey section left blank by the survey taker was assigned NA except for obvious omission within the context of contiguous surveys, like school; hence,the actual number of answers may vary among columns.

Categorization of answers was based upon key word criteria, order of ideas mentioned, and broad concept underlying the answers. Any answer too difficult to categorize was assigned “other” as a category. See the examples mentioned in the Description section.

As a result, the data obtained from the survey takers can be analyzed according to many variables and many internal controls are present while surveying twice, thus our study workflow can be generalized and data from different studies with the same structure can put together into studies of a larger public.

Dynamic and explaining of Lecture:

• Work tools:
  • PowerPoint presentation.
  • Blackboard for specific explaining.

• Places:
  • Classrooms
  • Forums

• Guideline of lecture:
  • Lecture begins with different concepts about life, the purpose of this is given the first hit to students changing or getting an abstraction about what is life.
  • Explaining molecular concept of genes and how this make functions.
  • At his moment we elevate imagination of student, creating expectations to them about many genes are many functions.
  • After moment 3, comes reality with parallel arguments between computers and cells, and how these bioparts can create a biomachine.
  • Then, ideas about how to change, measure, to understand and knowledge a biomachine are explained with simple concepts of Restriction Enzyme, Statistics and Mathematical Model.
  • What is iGEM competition, some shocking examples and own project.
  • Drawback issues, purpose and summary about synthetic biology were reminded.
  • Thanks.

Results

The raw data from the surveys can be found here.

Providing the definition.- Our strategy reached its objective

As mentioned before, our main goal was to provide people with a “practical definition” of synthetic biology which is oriented towards the concept of engineering biological systems. As can be seen in figure 1, when comparing personal definitions of synthetic biology before and after the talk given to students, nearly the half of the students surveyed (~42%) oriented their definitions towards the concept of biological engineering. This involves the use of interchangeable parts, design and construction of biological systems as opposed to artificial life per se, mixing engineering with biology and the pursue of a goal or benefit. Figure 2 shows all the definition categories for students before the talk. Although many people remained with the concept of genetic modification once the talk was given, this result suggests that the goal of providing the definition was accomplished.

Public Opinion

Several aspects concerning public opinion about the topic were addressed. These include a) to obtain an estimate of people supporting SB after attending the talk by schools(Figure 3), b) to evaluate the belief of engineering biology in the present day (Figure 4), c) meet people's opinion about what positive and negative consequences are brought about by the advance of SB as a technology (Figures 5 and 6), and d) to estimate how many years people expect to pass before SB changes our lives (Figure 7). In a general sense, the results suggest that the high school students are strongly supportive towards the development of synthetic biology, and the number of individuals that initially didn't believe in engineering organisms contrasts with the amount of students believing in the possibility of engineering organisms now. Figure 3 and 11, column 5 (La Salle León School) show a bigger proportion of disapproval towards SB. While the reason for this remains to be elucidated, a possible factor could be the religious orientation of the institution. No significant orientation in negative comments was detected for this school.

With respect to positive and negative comments, it is important to notice that negative opinions were considerably less than positive ones (98 compared to 313), so in order to avoid any biases in future surveys of this kind, more emphasis on possible problematics has to be done. Unfortunately, different time assignment from an institution to another made it difficult to organize debates addressing positive as well as negative consequences.

Figure 7 shows intervals of time in which the students believe SB will change our lives. During the talk, emphasis was made that SB technology will probably make a revolution on the way we live now, and that this revolution was about to happen. All this was supported by the various examples of iGEM technological, health-related and environmental ideas. Given this, the vast majority of people expect this change to happen within the next 5 to 10 years; moreover, 5 and 10 years correspond to the peaks with most votes. The next peak is around 20 years, where the accumulation of votes accumulates and forms a second peak in this interval. Thus, the students surveyed either believe that advances in SB are happening fast enough, or that delays are bound to occur because of the technological transition, commercialization, etc.

In short, the majority of high school students surveyed have a positive attitude towards SB and its consequences in our lives. This can be explained because the problems they think the most about (Figure 2) could be given a solution by this technology. Also encouraging is the potential improvement of life quality and human capabilities that SB promises (Figure 5).

Discussion

Several potentially influential variables were not taken into consideration during the whole process. First, the different subpopulations of students and talk times due to the institutions' decisions; second, the non-equal populations of individuals taking each survey; third, the lack of a measure of consistency throughout the surveys (i.e., to discard inconsistent ones). Figure 8 shows that the distribution ages of individuals remains practically equal in both surveys, which suggests that the population composition is not subject to tremendous change. Despite these and perhaps more intrinsic drawbacks of such a work, the data have been collected and therefore can be exhaustively mined in search for patterns and trends. However, we believe that trends detected for high school students here will have little change because of the size of our sample from different regions, and that adding more groups of people by the application of this methodology will surely let us elucidate those trends in the population.

Conclusions and Perspectives

Since the social objectives of Synthetic Biology involve making people in the world aware of the upcoming revolution, our team's survey-talk-survey strategy succeeded in a) designing and applying a controllable strategy to provide a practical definition for Synthetic Biology based on biological engineering, b) starting diffusion about Synthetic Biology in Mexican high school students so they are prepared for the future, and c) setting grounds to expand the communication of synthetic biology across all the different groups of people in Mexico. The scope of this work is intended to grow dramatically in future iGEM competitions.

Such a “standardization” in communication is a key element in order to correctly direct the diffusion of information about synthetic biology in Mexico and other countries, and the application of the standard will render the understanding of SB manageable to every population in the world, so that all the benefits we can get from this revolution become our goals.