Team:Groningen/Survey

1: Bacteria are dangerous
2: Most bacteria cause diseases
3: DNA is dangerous
4: I understand what genetic modification is
5: Genetic modification should be restricted
6: I understand what synthetic biology is
7: Synthetic biology is like acting as God
8: Synthetic biology sounds dangerous
9: Synthetic biology is not something I encounter on a regular basis

We conducted a survey to see what people think about synthetic biology and its ethical aspects. We made a questionnaire in which the responders had to assign a 1-5 mark to the following statements:

A mark of 1 means that you fully disagree, a mark of 2 means that you disagree, a mark of 3 means that you have no opinion, a mark of 4 means you agree and a mark of 5 means that you fully agree.

The survey was conducted after the presentations at high schools and at the Kenniscafé. 56 people filled it in, in the graph you can see the average opinion under all reactions. We also specified the opinion of high school students (43) and others (12), these are also visible in the graph. The others category consists of both university students and working people. Finally, some high school students also came to the Kenniscafé and filled in the questionnaire twice. Their reactions are shown in Graph x under high school students 2 (6).

When looking at the graph, please note that the higher the score, the more the respondents agreed with the statement. It is immediately clear that the high school students who filled in the questionnaire twice and the others agree more on statements 4,6 and disagree more on statements 8 and 9. This means that they feel that they know what genetic modification and synthetic biology is about and that they think that it important and not so dangerous. For the other statements, the reactions seem pretty close together. So we can conclude that the majority of our respondents does not think of bacteria and DNA as something really dangerous.