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:

*Link to survey*

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.