Human Practices Silver
Survey about Synthetic Biology
To learn more about how the society thinks about synthetic biology, we created an online survey and spread it on various channels, explicitly trying to reach people with a lower educational status or a very religious perspective on the world.
At the end we had reached the huge number of 396 participants.
As many people do not know what synthetic biology is, we decided to add a short, clearly understandable description of the term into the survey, in order to inform people about it. The ones, who have claimed to know what synthetic biology is, were asked to name the information sources and shortly describe the concept in their own words.
The most relevant question for us was would you buy paper which was recycled with help of Synthetic Biology?
Luckily, the results really speak in favour for our project: 298 survey-participants would buy it (94,3%), 18 would not (5,7%).
Words-Cloud for our question what is synthetic biology?
Essay on biosafety and society
Ideas move the world, but ideas that do not fit to societies ideals will not preveal. In order to deepen the study of human practices, iGEM team Bonn has written an essay on this premise. Using the project as a script to highlight different principles we think are important , we developed them point by point, from a sociological and ethical perspective, which are closely related to biosafety. Is it fair to think of biosafety as only one set of laws? What else is there to know and take into account when developing a successful project? See what we have to say and click on the link.
Education and Public Engagement
Have a look at the marvellous science slams we made for informing the publicity about synthetic biology and iGEM: