Introduction

As we carried out our public engagement throughout the course of our project we wanted to address two questions in order to make our activities in this area meaningful and useful. Who do we need to talk to and what do these people want or need to know?

We carried out a survey to find out which aspects of the project public were least familiar with to provide a focal point for our engagement activities. We split the responses into two categories according to the age of respondents; under 21 and over 21 as many of the older groups had very few members. From this survey we found that 90% of people had heard of genetic engineering but we found that people in the younger group were more likely to have heard of genetic engineering and, in a further question, were more likely to be prepared to take a genetically engineered bacterium as a medical treatment. This suggested to us that education is linked to our our treatment being accepted by the general public, and therefore the ongoing success of our project.

Only 45% of people had heard of synthetic biology and as this is what iGEM is about we decided this was another topic we should focus on when engaging with the public so that people can fully understand what we are trying to do.

In the same survey we found that only 29% of people had heard of Orphan diseases such as Wilson's disease. Lack of awareness is a massive problem for rare diseases as it makes it harder for people to be correctly diagnosed and funding for treatments of these diseases is harder to obtain as they only affect small numbers of people. We decided this would be something we could publicise that would have a beneficial impact beyond iGEM for people who have Wilson's disease and other rare diseases.

Our engagement can be split into three different levels; local, national and international activities. Within these categories, some activities were specific where we explained the exact mechanisms of our project and got people interested in the potential of synthetic biology, while others were more general and helped bring the general issues of our project to a wider audience.

Cardiff

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XMU

We sent team XMU-China some of the parts made by last year's Oxford iGEM team that they were unable to obtain from the registry themselves. This enabled them to carry out their project successfully as they were able to use all the parts that they wanted.

SVCE_CHENNAI

We filled in team SVCE-CHENNAI's survey on lab techniques to pass on our experiences of protocols that worked, and others which didn't, in order to help them improve efficiency for other iGEM teams in the future.