Difference between revisions of "Team:SCAU-China/HP/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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our education included spreading scientific knowledge to the kids and farmers in the countrysides and giving courses for high school students.

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.

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.

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.