Team:SCAU-China/HP/Gold
Gold
Our human practices involve in several aspects including biosafety, social activity and public education. Our aSTARice is a genetically-modified organism, (GMO), so our work focuses on promotion of the knowledge for GMO and survey on people's concern about GMO.
1. Survey
We hoped our human practice work could influence more ordinary people. So, we should understand the people's opinions towards GMO food. Thus we made a questionnaire about GMO.
The data we have obtained in questionnaire is showing below:
The respondents' proportion between men and women is approximately balanced. The number of age group from 18 to 25 is the majority. What's more, the respondents have a Bachelor degree or a higher degree.
1.1 The main contents
Question 4: Do you know what GMO is?
Analysis of the Q4: 4/5 of the respondents have a certain understanding for " GMO technology", 1/5 respondents don’t understand this technology or even know nothing about it. This suggests that the " GMO technology" is accepted by the majority of respondents.
Question 6: Will you eat GMO food?
Analysis: About a third of the people can accept GMO food. 17% of people refused to eat GMO food. The data suggests that the public acceptance for GMO foods is improving.
Question 11: Is transgenosis beneficial or harmful in your opinion?
Analysis: Most people have a skeptical attitude to GMO. For respondents, GMO is an emerging technology. The public don't understand enough about GMO crops, so they cannot hold a certain attitude to it.
Question 12:Will you use GMO products (non-food)?
Question 13: Have you ever heard of skin care product that contains astaxanthin?
Question 14: Will you choose skin care product or health food which contains astaxanthin (GMO) ?
If new GMO foods were put into market, about half of people can fully accept. While the acceptance of GMO products (non-food) is even higher. However, our public do not know much about astaxanthin product at present, So we should enhance the propaganda.
According to the data which we have got from investigation, we can see that most people are now holding a neutral attitude on development of GMO, so it's possible that we can help them to learn more about transgenic and dispel their qualm, thus making more people accept GMO products. So as to achieve this aim, we designed a series of interesting activities.
2. Spreading knowledge to our society
2.1 Writing GMO handbook
After participating in several lectures and talks, we learnt a lot. Later we wrote a handbook about GMO as a summary, which contains our answers to many questions about GMO. We can use this as educational material. The list below is content of our handbook.
the chapter of popular science
1.What do you eat
1. Brief introduction to genetically modified food that you eat
2. A reasonable concern——glyphosate
3. Better gm products
2.Pathological obsession——Opposition to genetically modified
1.‘They’ want to confuse you
2. The preliminary victory——Papaya
3. Organic food is not more secure
4. Being hated humanitarian projects——Golden rice
the chapter of Genetically modified knowledge
1.Basic knowledge of genetically modified
1.What is genetically modified
2.What's the relationship between genetic and biological traits
3.What is a genetically modified technology and products
2.The characteristics of the genetically modified technology
1.What is the commonly used genetically modified (gm) technology
2.What similarities and differences between transgenic technology and the traditional breeding
3.What are genetically modified (gm) technology applications
3.The development of genetically modified
1.How is Genetically modified that produce and develop?
2.What are genetically modified research direction in the global
3.What is the matter of the industrialization of the genetically modified organisms
4.Genetically modified technology development present situation
the chapter of Safety regulation
1.Genetically modified product safety
1.what aspects that Genetically modified product safety involves
2.What's the argument about Genetically modified product safety?
3.How to evaluate the safety of genetically modified products
4.Can we detect genetically modified ingredients
5.What are genetically modified organisms test method
2.Genetically modified regulatory policy
1. How to regulate genetically modified (gm) technology and its products
the chapter of SCAU-CHINA team
1.SCAU-CHINA team
1.What is iGEM?
2.Who is SCAU-CHINA team?
3.What is the project of SCAU-CHINA?
2.SCAU-CHINA team’s Project results——Astaxanthin rice
1.the introduction of Technical principle
2.Technology application
2.2 Bauhinia Festival of Science and Culture
In our university, the annual Bauhinia Festival of Science, Technology and Culture is a great activity, thousands of citizens in Guangzhou gather together in SCAU to enjoy the beautiful flower of bauhinia and new research in our university. This year, we seized this opportunity and showed interesting biology to many visitors, mostly young persons and children. We showed microscope and tissue culture technology. We made some beautiful postcards about SCAU or iGEM. We brought some books and brochures about some laws and funny things about GMO. For example, sweet potato has some DNA originating from Agrobacterium, which means they are natural transgenic in the world.
Our work turned out to be a great success. The most famous newspaper in our city--Guangzhou Daily interviewed our team leader and reported us with a brief introduction of our project and this activity. SCAU newspaper and SCAU Official WeChat also highlighted our activities.
2.3 Education
Our education included spreading scientific knowledge to the kids and farmers in the countrysides and giving courses for high school students.
2.4 Spread scientific knowledge to countrysides
Our country is a developing country and those people in countrysides can hardly get as much information and knowledge as those in cities. So we decided to do more efforts to spread our knowledge to farmers and students in countrysides. We sent our educational handbooks to farmers and rural schools in Qingyuan, Shaoguan, Maoming and Zhaoqing of Guangdong province.
The handbooks contain lots of information about modern methods of cultivating the local specialty crops, including protocol of cultivating watermelon and papaya fruit in modern way. It's possible that we can help some people in countryside who are eager to get more information on agriculture, and they might generally accept modern agriculture or even GMO crops.
Our teammates gave basic and funny biology courses in primary schools in countrysides. Our lessons may influence their lives and change their fate.
2.5 Giving courses for high school students
We also gave courses for high school students of Guangzhou NO.47 Middle School, Guangdong experimental High School and Guangdong Guangya High School. Our courses mainly focused on the advance research in biological areas in these years, especially synthetic biology. We've also introduced iGEM to them and showed them how to take part in iGEM as a high school student. After that, we also built up a good relationship with a high school group from Guangdong experimental High School and Guangdong Guangya High School.
According to the feedback, the students have a better understanding of biology after our lessons. It's quite a good experience to communicate with middle school students and teach them what we've obtained in taking iGEM competition and doing biological research.
2.6 Exhibitions in the entrepreneurship-space
According to investigation, it seems that people are not very willing to use astaxanthin. So we participated in several exhibitions in the entrepreneurship-space and showed our posters about astaxanthin and aSTARice. These exhibitions were so successful that attracted the attention of the whole society, even some officials from native government attended.
