Team:UCL/Engagement
<!DOCTYPE html>
EDUCATION + PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
Our motivation
Even if Biosynthage were able to clinically validate that our therapies are safe to administer to humans and greatly increase healthy human lifespan, we are still not able to implement them into today’s society. This is because the public would need to realise that healthy ageing is a problem that requires synthetic biology intervention. To do this, Biosynthage needed to change the way people think about healthy ageing through interacting with as many people as we could. Changing opinions and points of views is the best way to increase our impact at making people realise the magnitude of the ageing problem. Since ageing is a global issue, we wanted to incorporate the views of the diverse population. Below, are the details of what Biosynthage are doing to increase the awareness of synthetic biology, healthy ageing and iGEM!
WHAT IS THE WORLDS OPINION?
International Survey
So far, our project has been greatly shaped by the public. We are all stakeholders of ageing as we are all effected by it hence why we wanted to find out what the global population thought about our ideas. We thought that a survey would be the best way to easily reach a large, diverse population. This way, we were even able to reach to people from all around the world without even travelling there. In fact, our survey was filled out by 218 people from 30 different countries in 4/7 continents! As well as this, we were also able to translate our survey into Mandarin and distribute the survey through our Wechat account acquiring over 120 responses alone from this survey. This then adds up to 348 total international and national participants that took our survey.
The survey also gathered information on the gender, age, and their level of knowledge in Synthetic biology. We felt that it was important to gather data that accurately represented the variety of knowledge in the general community and to see if these factors affect the outcome of the survey.
The results showed that 28.49% of the public know nothing about synthetic biology and 20.4% of this was from people who live in China and were aged 17-20 and 21-30 year olds. 21.2% of responders are not accepting of synthetic biology and think we are playing god. We have written about our exploration of religion, synthetic biology and our project on this page to understand this more. 76.7% of the general public also think that they have not been educated about synthetic biology and 81.2% of respondents also agreed that primary or secondary school should be educated about synthetic biology as a part of the curriculum. Based on the results, it is apparent that respondents felt like there hasn’t been sufficient education related to Synthetic Biology. Considering these results, we have decided to organise outreach programs for students and adults of different ages to expand their knowledge and consciousness of Synthetic Biology (see below for details).
More importantly, when we asked if the respondents wanted to live longer, fewer people answered yes then compared to when they were asked if they want to live healthier longer. This shows that our project is relevant to the needs of the general public as more would rather live healthier for longer than just live longer.
EDUCATING THE NEXT GENERATION: OUTREACH
Activities for outreach
In response to the survey, we wanted to make synthetic biology and iGEM more accessible to the younger generation and raise awareness of synthetic biology in a fun way. So we decided that we wanted to make some resources for young children about our project, synthetic biology and ideas around synthetic biology. Our survey also highlighted that synthetic biology is less well known in other countries around the world. So we also have this document translated in English, German, French, Farsi, Spanish and Mandarin (do contact us for these versions!)
Click here to download Should we treat ageing is a disease?
EDUCATING ADULTS
App developed for adults and elderly.
Technology is becoming ubiquitous in our society. With increased access to easy to use, yet powerful devices even the elderly are starting to adopt technology like smartphones and tablets. As mobile phones are becoming increasing part of our lives, we thought that developing an app may be a great way to get more people more aware of synthetic biology. We have decided to create a game that works by getting users to create certain biobricks, where the gene of interest will only complete the biobrick if the plasmid backbone is cut with the correct restriction enzymes. We want to make it as user friendly as possible and we are hoping to integrate our project and iGEM into the app as well.
We think there is great potential here, so we developed an app to try and widen public awareness of synthetic biology. We targeted the app at the older generation and aiming to give them a basic understanding of genetic engineering and the biobrick method of producing plasmids as there are very few apps that are targeted to the older population. Healthy ageing is all about taking care of our mind as well as bodies and our game can certainly exercise the brain to maintain the healthy brain!
The main part of the app is a game where you design a plasmid and see how bacteria behave under conditions that can be changed in real time, we also have built animations to explain the biobrick process and the different aspects of the project in an easy to understand way. Due to lack of time the app is still the early stages of development. We plan on working with focus groups of elderly to decrease the technological understanding needed to independently learn from the app and make it as accessible as possible.
We are also widening awareness of our project by having our biobricks in the app.
SPREADING THE WORD ABOUT OUR PROJECT
Online community
Around 72% of adults in the UK use a computer at least once a day. We wanted to share our experiences and highlights of GEM with the online community to increase awareness of synthetic biology and our project! We created blog where we have posted some tips for future GEM teams, based on what we are learning as we go through the process and monthly project updates. You can see our blog here.
We have also created fun vlogs that sum up what we have been doing. From lab work to socialising, vlogs have been fun to make. Have a look at our youtube channel. The vlogs can be seen below!
VLOG 1
VLOG 2
