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

Our human practice work involves several questions relating to biosafety, social justice and public acceptance. Our aSTARice is actually a genetically-modified organism, so our work focuses on people's concern about GMO (genetically modified organisms).

We hoped our human practice work could influence more ordinary people. So, above all, we should realize other people's opinions towards transgenic food. Because of that, 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 genetically modification (gm) is?

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 know nothing about it. This suggests that the "GM technology" is accepted by the majority of respondents.

Question 6: Will you eat gm food?

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

Question 11: Is transgenosis beneficial or harmful in your opinion?

Analysis: Most people have a 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.

Question 12: Will you use gm 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 (gm) ？

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.

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 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 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 this 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 sent our educational handbooks to farmers and rural schools in Qingyuan, Shaoguan, Maoming and Zhaoqing, all of which are located in Guangdong province.

The first thing we’ve done is sending handbooks about modern agriculture to farmers in these remote places. The handbooks contain 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 are eager to get more informations 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 lives 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 areas 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 these 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.

According to investigation, it seems that people are not very willing to use astaxanthin. So we participated in several exhibitions at university’s heckerspace 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.