Difference between revisions of "Team:SCAU-China/Integrated Practices"

Our human practice work involved several questions relating to biosafety,social justice and public acceptance.Our aSTARice is actually a genetically modified organism,so our work focus on people’s concern about GMO.

Our public activities is the main body of our human practice,we took a lot efforts on it.As we all know,genetically modify is now a critical technology,which is misunderstood by many people.Because our astaxanthin rice is basically a kind of transgenic product,it's our duty to do some efforts to help our society to form a correct understanding of this technology.

First of all,we should make sure that we ourselves have correct understanding on this question.For this reason,we took part in a great lecture about transgenic.

Keynote speaker of this lecture includes Kou Jianping ,who is director of the Department of “genetically modified organisms safety management and Intellectual Property Office” from “Department of Science, Technology and Education” in MOA(Minstry of Agriculture) of China,and Lin Min,who is director of Institute of Biotechnology of CAAS(Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences).

In this lecture，we got to know that transgenic foods,that are saleing in market are absolutely safe.For they were tested by associated departments and labs for many years in scientific way.And up to now，there are only a few kinds of transgenic products have gotten permission into Chinese market. After lecture,we communicated with this scientists about new technologies on transgenic research.

Apart from that,we've also took part in a talk given by Wu Yongning,who is the director of “Key Laboratory of Food Safety Risk Assessment,Ministry of Health”,which belongs to China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment (CFSA).In this talk,we obtained a lot of informations in analysing GMO.

As we are working to create a new kind of crop,we think we should also know more about agriculture,so we joined in The Sixth Asian Conference on Precision Agriculture as volunteers.

We hoped our human practice work can influence more ordinary people.So,above all,we should realize other people's opinion to transgenic food.Because of that,we made a questionnaire about GMO.

The data we’ve obtained in questionnaire is showing below:

The respondents’  proportion of men and women is approximately balanced. The number of age group which between 18 from 25 is the majority.What’s more , the respondents have a Bachelor degree or a higher degree.

Analysis of the Q4:4/5 of the respondents have a certain understanding for "GM technology"，1/5 respondents don’t understand this technology or even don’t know. This suggests that the "GM technology" was received by the majority of respondents.

Analysis :About a third of the people can accept genetically modified (gm) food. 17% of people determined not to eat genetically modified food.Suggest that the public acceptance for genetically modified foods is improving.

Analysis : Most people had skeptical attitude to genetically modification (gm) . For respondents,genetically modification is an emerging technology. The public don’t understand enough about genetically modified crops,so they cannot hold a certain attitude to it.

Question13: Have you ever heard of skin care product that contains astaxanthin?

If new genetically modified foods were put into market, about half of people can fully accept.While the acceptance of gm products (non-food) is even higher . However,our public do not know much about astaxanthin product at present, So we should Enlarge the propaganda.

writing 《GMO handbook》 After participating in several lectures and talks,we learnt a lot.So we wrote a handbook about genetically modified organism ( GMO ) as a summary,which contains our answers to many questions.We can use this as educational and popularizational material.The list below is content of our handbook.

In South China Agricultural University(SCAU),Bauhinia Festival on Science,Technology and Culture is a great activity every year On this day,tens of thousands of citizens in Guangzhou gather together in SCAU to enjoy the sight of bauhinia and new research in our university. This year,we seized this opportunity and showed interesting biology to hundreds of visitors,mostly young persons and childs.We showed fluorescent protein,microscope and tissue culture technology.These attracted a lot of citizens.In the meantime,we brought some books and brochures about some laws and funny things about GMO.For example,sweet potato has some DNA parts which are originally came from Agrobacterium,which means that transgenic is exist in the natural world.

To attract more people to visit our stall,we also made some beautiful postcards about SCAU or iGEM.

Our work finally 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 activity.SCAU newspaper and SCAU Official WeChat also reported us.

We even invited visitors to taste our genetically modified papayas.All the papayas selling in markets are GMO,but they’ve been commercialized for many years.Through this activity,we want to convey a message that GM crops are not devils,if we utilize transgenic technology in a reasonable way,they can be soft and sweet like papaya!

Our education including two parts:"Spreading scientific knowledge to countrysides"and"Giving courses for high school students".

Social justice is a important question we are concerning about.As we all known,our country is a developing country and those people in countrysides can hardly get as much information and knowledge as those in cities.So after we did the education work in several high schools in Guangzhou,we decided to do more efforts to spread our knowledge to farmers and students in countrysides.We had sent our educational handbooks to farmers and schools from countrysides in Qingyuan,Shaoguan,Maoming and Zhaoqing,both are locating in Guangdong province.

The first thing we’ve done is sending handbooks about modern agriculture to farmers in these remote places.The handbooks contains a lot information about modern methods of cultivating the local specialty crops,including protocol of cultivating watermelon and pitaya fruit in modern way .It's possible that we can help some people in countryside who is eager to get more information on agriculture,and they might generally accept modern agriculture or even genetically modified crops.

Now that we need to use our knowledge to help people in countrysides,we think we'd better offer lessons for next generation,so our teammates joined in teams which are going to give courses in primary schools in countrysides and mainly worked in sending basic and funny biology lessons.Those kids are very fond of us and maybe our lessons will actually influence their life and utilize the new knowledge to change their fate.

We also gave courses for high school students from Guangzhou NO.47 Middle School,Guangdong experimental High School and Guangdong Guangya High School.Our course mainly focus on the advance research in biological area in these years,especially synthentic 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 of our students,they 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.