Public Engagement

This year, we actively engaged with different stakeholders in our conversation about gene editing and educated the public to obtain meaningful opinions about their acceptance towards the technology.

Firstly, our public engagement was expanded to the world outside Singapore. We are aware that Singapore is a country with a limited landscape and our effort of education and the information we learned influence and reflect only our local community. However, as Singapore is the popular destination for medical tourism in Asia, we aimed to reach out to as many citizens in the region about gene editing and hearing their opinions. To achieve this, we collaborated with the University of Indonesia to help us to organize a public education and engagement for our project in Indonesia. Similarly, we also conducted our survey in three different countries as mentioned above, taking our project to a greater region. 

Also, our public engagement is aiming for our future. For example, we interviewed a group of training doctors in addition to seasoned ones in practice. While the experienced doctors are definitely more knowledgeable and are better experts to advise us, we believe that it is equally important to hear what future doctors think of our project, as they will be the ones facing the patients and advise them about the therapy. The feedback was indeed of great value and inspired us to further improve our research. Similarly, we especially reached to young adults in public education.

 Human-Centered Research

Human practice played a leading role in our research. To investigate the most current public opinion about gene editing in our region, we conducted a survey that elicited more than 500 responses from three selected countries, Singapore, Indonesia, and China. Not only did our survey highlight to us what is the preferred choice of gene editing in our local community and the importance of different factors in decision making, but through contrasting with other nations with, it also measured the relative level of acceptance of Singaporeans towards gene editing as compared to the region. Such a transnational analysis really helped us to measure the local attitude towards gene editing in Singapore and advised us about the essential aspects to improve our project. 

As such, our human practice evolved our project to explore new solutions that better cater to the need of our local community. The initial design of our project was mainly focused on achieving base editing in DNA. However, after a series of public engagement activities, we have learned more about the public interest — RNA editing and integrated it into our project. After hearing from medical professionals about their concern regarding the high cost of RNA sequencing in future diagnosis, we further improved our project by including an efficient, less costly RNA sequencing techniques. Such a transformation made our human practice an integral part for our project.

 Conclusion

As such, we feel that not only does our human practice satisfied the criteria for medals, but also we truly felt that our project is a good example how researchers should engage in conversation with the society. With both scientific survey and interpersonal interaction, we believe our conclusion in human practice is generalizable yet retained the human touch. By having discussions with all stakeholders at work in the gene editing topic, we were able to obtain a good understanding about the big situation, and conduct research that stays connected with the society.