Why We Chose to Do Integrated Human Practice

The idea that is presented here on our wiki has evolved a lot since we first started the journey towards the Giant Jamboree 2018. Through involving different stakeholders, experts, and the public we managed to get the best out of our work. During the process of evolving our project we frequently asked the following questions:

Is our project useful?

Who can make use of our end product?

Where are the limitations and the potential bottlenecks?

What does the the public know about Synthetic Biology and how should this affect the way we present our work?

What is the most important aspect of Synthetic Biology according to the public?

Since we started asking these questions, our project has changed focus. Our idea changed from gaining insight into how chaperones in E.coli can be used to study protein folding in neurodegenerative diseases, to focusing on increasing protein production by facilitating the folding process.

This development came from a number of steps taken within the project. By continuing reading, we will do our best in order to guide you through these steps.

Survey - Letting the Public Influence What We Do in The Lab

During the course of the project, we became interested in finding out how much the general public in Sweden knows about the field of Synthetic Biology. We also wanted to know which part/parts of the field they think is the most important to make research within. In order to this out, we decided to conduct a survey.

The survey was constructed with the help of Marie Berlin, who has much experience within the field of social science. Marie Berlin is a PhD student at the department of Sociology at Stockholms University. Through her help as our social science expert, we could construct the following survey questionnaire:
Survey Questionnaire: LiU iGEM .

To get a broad perspective of samples, we went to central Linköping to find participants for our survey. This resulted in a total of 92 participants and a mean age of ~37 years.

Through this survey, we got the opinion of the public, concerning our project (and Synthetic Biology in general). With that in mind we could let it influence our work. For one, we adjusted our way of presenting the project to the public, but we also made changes in the lab.

In the survey the participants were asked to rate their knowledge about synthetic biology, the result can be seen in the diagram below where 1 is much knowledge, 2 is some, 3 is poor, 4 is none and 5: unable to answer.

*DIAGRAM*

As can be seen, most people feel that they have poor knowledge about the field of synthetic biology. This is something that should be taken into account when trying to communicate what we are doing in the lab. As a result of this, we tried to communicate our project through multiple channels. For example: when we took care about the Instagram account aimed at potential and current students at Linköping University (LiU Student) we tried to tell what we are doing through short videos, pictures and short texts. We hope that this proved a more engaging way to find out about the project.

The results also showed that the public prioritises synthetic biology in research over production of pharmaceuticals and other industrial production as can be seen in the diagram below. 1 correlates to the amount of people who put research as the highest priority, 2 to production of pharmaceuticals, and 3 to industry.

*DIAGRAM*

This result, together with discussions within the team and with our PIs, made us switch from a focus on trying to understand the mechanisms behind protein folding in E.coli to one focusing on trying to increase the amount of correctly folded proteins. Because the survey showed that the public is more concerned with research than with e.g. industry, we chose to test our system of chaperones on proteins used in research at Linköping University.