There are several more good reasons for VR development in laboratory education that prompted us to develop this, amongst which:

• Diverse safety measure incorporation

To identify the usefulness of VR for safety training we had a talk with Erwin van Rijn, the safety coordinator at the Bionanoscience Department of the TU Delft. He recommended to focus on general lab training for beginning life science students. In this training we incorporated safety procedures, which can be extended in the future.

• Less dangerous

Fellow students sometimes complained to us that during their first times in the lab they would not always exactly know what they were doing. Therefore, beginning students might experience difficulties with exactly determining the risks involved in every procedure that they carry out. Even though this is what we always try to overcome by good preparation, practicing in the lab is often different. Therefore, practicing in VR is a good opportunity better evaluate the risks involved in real life laboratory practices.

• Costs

A talk with the program coordinator of Nanobiology at Delft University of Technology, Serge Donkers, revealed that laboratory education is highly expensive, partly due to the extra laboratory space and equipment that is required. Therefore, often this type of education is kept to a minimum to reduce costs. VR could change this to prepare young researchers better for the future that is awaiting them.

• Less waste

Students learn laboratory skills by practice, which means many petri dishes, pipet points, but also chemicals are wasted. With VR, power is used, but much plastic as well as chemical and biological waste is saved.

• Teachers can easily and on the spot observe their students’ progress

In VR, teachers can track individual progress and add personal challenges from a distance for optimal learning curves.

• Students could practice at home, if they like

Students could have their lab at home in VR for their laboratory practice, given their computers have the right specifics.

• Zooming in

Students could zoom in on their samples, giving them a better idea of what they are actually doing.

We decided to have one main topic of debate: 'The goal of sports is to get the best out of people. Is science allowed to contribute to this in any way?' After dividing the class over several groups of interest, e.g. the Ministry of Health and Sports, Sport doctors, Athletes and Fans, they could discuss their opinions in the light of their interest group.

Subsequently, they had to come to a united conclusion with the aid of some text fragments selected by us to provide a broader focus. Below in figure 5, the template is displayed that the students used for recording their opinions.

In setting up the lessons, we closely collaborated with Hannah Stammes from the education department of Delft University of Technology to have the most effective outcome of the debates. We followed the so-called 5E model. The five E's stand for Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate respectively. In the Engage phase of our visits we anticipated what we were going to do and made connections between the background knowledge of the students and the principles of gene doping and our detection device. Also, we evaluated the sports affinity of the class and made a link to sports events as the Tour de France that was upcoming.

After the Engage phase, the students could explore in their group discussion and source evaluation (Sources used by the students: fragments from “Topsport en gendoping: grenzen aan sport, opsporing en geloofwaardigheid” by Ivo van Hilvoorde and from “How Sports Would Be Better With Doping” from WIRED). We walked around to train them to explain their arguments.

Subsequently, during the explain phase there would be a discussion between all groups representing the different stakeholders. Often, this plenary debate would be vigorous, with students passionately defending their opinions against their classmates.

Then, we would answer their technical questions and we would evaluate the students knowledge in turn. Interestingly, some students independently came up with challenges we faced. An example is the insertion of small introns that could make exogenous EPO e.g. harder to detect. This gave a good idea of their high conceptual understanding as well.

We had the following hypotheses with results:

• We expected a general fear of gene technology due to a lack of information supply on the topic to the general public both in The Netherlands as well as in China.

Most people are not afraid for gene technology in both countries and there seems to be only little difference between both countries. In The Netherlands only 11.2% is afraid of gene technology, which is 13.7% in the People’s Republic of China. In addition, more than 75% of the respondents in The Netherlands indicated they would like to be more informed about developments in biotechnology through e.g. debates.

• We hypothesized that people would be hesitant to use gene doping because the phenomenon will sound new and thereby dangerous to many people at this point. Based on a paper by Connor et al. (2009) that did research on the tendency towards doping use in athletes, one would expect that less than 12 per cent of the respondents from the general public would take gene doping for performance enhancement.

For the Dutch population this prediction is still relatively close to the 16% that actually wants to use gene doping for purposes other than just medical. For the Chinese population this prediction is clearly wrong as there 55% is open to using gene doping for performance enhancement. Together, given the extra pressure that is generally put on athletes, these figures provide us with an alarming estimation for possible gene doping use among the athlete population. In China we asked an additional question though that shows 10% of the general public would even like to take gene doping for performance enhancement if this would shorten their life to only five more years. Compared to Goldman’s dilemma that was developed in the 1990’s and found that more than half of the athletes questioned would take a performance enhancing drug that would kill them in 5 years (Goldman et al. 1992), this figure is relatively low. Keeping in mind however that we are polling the general population, this might be a figure consistent with Goldman’s research at the time. Later research from 2009 by Connor et al. indicated approximately 6% of the athletes at a track in the USA would take a similar drug (Connor et al. 2009), which is in turn lower than we found among this general population.

• We expected that people would generally not see gene doping as a problem, because they have most likely never heard of it before. Because gene doping is relatively unknown by the general public, we also expected people would think it will only become a problem in the future.

Both in China as well as in the Netherlands people think gene doping is not a real problem yet, although the percentages people estimate tend to result in relatively high numbers when applied to the athlete population. In the Rio Olympics of 2016 11544 athletes competed. If we apply the responses of the Dutch respondents to the Rio Olympics an absolute minimum of 760 athletes would have used gene doping on the 2016 Rio Olympics, compared to a minimum of 1075 athletes according to the Chinese respondents. On top of this, most respondents think gene doping will an even bigger problem in the (near) future. This might be a good indicator for the confidence athletes would put into these therapies.

• We believed people are generally in favor of very strict doping control, since doping is a word we associate immediately with something that should be prohibited.

Indeed, the majority is in favour of strict doping control maintenance. In The Netherlands almost 90% wants to maintain very strict doping controls and in China 70% wants this.

• We hypothesized that people generally don’t think gene doping could make sports fairer.

We thought people would naturally reject this and tried to challenge them in the debate before, comparing it to the natural unfairness inherent to gene distribution. In China 13% believes gene doping can make sports fairer. In The Netherlands 11.2% thinks the same, which is what we expected.

• We thought that people think gene doping should also be accessible to athletes to avoid large discrepancies between athletes and the rest of society.

In The Netherlands however, 66.5% thinks gene doping in sports should then still stay prohibited. Thus, most likely our detection method will have a market for many years to come.

Firstly, we were aware of a threat for endorsement effects. Endorsement effects are effects of expected preference that influence the respondents. Of course we explain who we are and that we are developing a detection method for gene doping. Nevertheless, during the discussions we actively kept an open mind on the topic and challenged people to think out of the box, adopting a neutral position ourselves by challenging the future of our method. We would not elaborate on our personal opinions before handing out the survey. On top of this, we hoped to circumvent any reference effects by having fully anonymous surveys that did not ask for any classification that could be associated with answer preferences. Then there often is the problem of question order effects, which we addressed by rephrasing several questions at different points of the survey. In the athlete survey we on top of this evaded the word “doping” to circumvent any bias that is directly inherent to this word. Instead we used words as genetic alterations and gene editing, which generally have less strong negative feelings attached to them.

The trains and public transport locations were chosen to reduce nonresponses and to have a highly representative population. Subsequently, we started off our surveys with several clear hypotheses and had 181 respondents in the Netherlands and 126 respondents in China.