Movie

We made an animated movie presenting our project. This will allow us to introduce synthetic biology in a funny way to a broad public. To measure the educational impact of our movie, we created a survey and had 2 groups of people answer it. To one group we showed our movie, to the other we showed a "neutral" one. We hope that making a simple and funny movie will make the public more aware of the benefits synthetic biology can bring to the society.

Results

• Knowledge

There are two kinds of knowledge we are interested in: the subjective knowledge and the objective knowledge. The subjective knowledge is the grade that people give to themselves, it is a measure of what they think they know about synthetic biology, on a scale from 0 to 100. The objective knowledge is based on 12 questions that test the knowledge of the people before and after the movie. Each question gives 1 point if it is correct or 0 if it is not. The total was scaled to 100 and plotted on the second graph. The results show that the objective knowledge significantly increases after watching our movie whereas the neutral movie did not help to answer the questions. That means that people understood this movie from an informative point of view. Moreover we get the same pattern when we analyse the questions related to synthetic biology in general (8 questions) and the questions related to our project (4questions) separately.

• Attitude

The question of the attitude was addressed in dual manner so that we separated the questions:

• How positive is synthetic biology IF we take into account only positive features of this domain.
• How negative is synthetic biology IF we take into account only negative features of this domain.

This allows us to evaluate the duality of the answers one can have toward those questions that involve both promising and potentially dangerous or harmful effects in the same time. Both these questions were addressed in triplicate (3 different manners to ask the same question) and each answer got a grade from 1 to 4 so the maximum of point one could get is 12. The results tell us that the positive attitude tends to decrease. But we see that the neutral video decreases it even more so we can’t say that it is due to the talk about synthetic biology. We see that our iGEM movie has no effect on the negative attitude.

• Emotions

We were also interested in emotions that could be triggered by the movie. So we asked people how much they feel: scared, nervous, afraid (negative emotion), interested, alerted, enthusiastic (positive emotion). We see that the negative emotion decreases together with the neutral movie, but we see a little but significant increase in negative emotions.

Theses results are quiet expected if we look at other study in the literature about genetic manipulations, like cloning or genetically modified organisms. It confirms us that even when a comprehension of the subject is present, this is not necessarily accompanied by an increase in positive attitude regarding these kind of subjects. Rather, it trigger a kind of fear in the population, even if they tend to promote some very promising and needed applications of bioengineering.

Running for iGem

During the summer we met a few mornings to run along the lake (and sometimes even swim!!!) before going to the lab... The ultimate aim is to run the Lausanne Marathon (quarter or half of it) !!! Sunday 31 October we'll run for iGem!!!