Team:TUDelft/HumanPractices/EducationandEngagement
Overview
As a team we realise how important education is when it comes to shaping and sharing the future of synthetic biology. Therefore, we incorporated education and public outreach throughout our project to mutually learn and open up the discussion about developments that have the potential to inherently change our society. Our project encompasses more than the design of a detection method for gene doping and stimulates people to actively be aware of the opportunities as well as the threats of synthetic biology as applied to gene technology and beyond.
1. Interactive Virtual Reality Laboratory
At the beginning of May, we started out with the innovative idea to create a Virtual Reality (VR) laboratory training environment. In this way we want to innovate in education for better, less expensive and more diverse laboratory preparation. Therefore, we measured every detail of our lab to have our lab with our method translated to VR, to make people experience our detection method while setting an example for future education. The idea started with one of our team members who had only little laboratory experience because this is an expensive component for the education program, as appreared after a talk with the study program coordinator, Serge Donkers. Therefore, we went into our own lab to measure everything, from the height of the benches to the dimensions of the pipet tips. In figure 1 you can see the result, our lab in real life and in virtual reality compared.
There are several more good reasons for VR development in Laboratory Education that prompted us to develop this, amongst which:
- Diverse safety measure incorporation
- Less dangerous
- Costs
- Less waste
- Teachers can easily and on the spot observe all their students’ progress
- Students could with a lite version practice more often at home if they like
- Zooming in
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. Here we together came to the conclusion the VR would be most effective for emergency training as fire incidences. He recommended to focus on general lab training for beginning life science students. In this training we incorporated safety procedures, which we did by focussing on parts of our project and identifying anything that could go wrong in the lab for a beginning or experienced experimental scientist.
Fellow students often complained to us during their first time in the lab as did 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 something 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.
A talk with the programme coordinator of Nanobiology at Delft University of Technology, Serge Donkers, revealed that laboratory education is enormously 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.
Students learn laboratory skills by practice, which means many petri dishes, pipet points, but also chemicals are spilled, which in VR is no issue. [include picture of all the waist per day]
The teacher can from a distance track individual progress and add personal challenges along the way for optimal learning curves.
Have your lab at home and prepare well in VR for your laboratory experiment.
Students could zoom in on their samples, giving them a better idea of what they are actually doing.
All these good reasons we summed up to interactively make people experience our project with an app. Try it out yourself here or come to our stand during the Giant Jamboree!
Delft University of Technology is currently thinking about opening a VR learning center, which we brought a little closer with this idea. We pitched the VR lab to the faculty heads and it has collected great interest. Hopefully, in this way we will soon have safer, less expensive and more flexible laboratory training. We would like to thank Arno Freeken, Luuk Goossen and Arend-Jan Krooneman from the Department of Architecture at Delft University of Technology for developing the technical part of the VR.
Watch here the reaction of our faculty heads and their experience.
2. Train Debates
Train passenger
People tend to live in their own bubbles. With selective social media messages, people tend to be informed only about their immediate interests. It can be enlightling to talk to people and engage in an open debate. On June 26th we decided to get Biotechnology Day from Belgium to the Netherlands by engaging people in a debate on gene technology on trains! Our team split up in three teams that travelled throughout the country. For mutual learning and engagement it is important to have a public as diverse as possible, and where to find this better than on trains that travel throughout a whole country? Not only did we inform and engage passengers, we also learnt from them about the general opinion on several aspects of our project through a survey. 75 Percent indicated that there should be more public debates on developments in biotechnology in general to inform the public and reduce fear caused by ignorance. That was what we strived for with our outreach activities with which we on purpose tried to adress the general public. See our contributions page to learn about the set up we used for the debate.
Train passenger
Train passenger
One of our teammembers on a discussion in the train:
ADOPE team member
3. Gene Doping in Society Surveys
We handed out surveys both during the train debates and in the public transports and streets during our time in China. From the start we focussed on reducing any survey response effects, which are unintended psychological effects influencing the responses of the respondents. We found alarmingly high numbers of people intrested to use gene doping for performance enhancement among the general public in both The Netherlands as well as in China. This reinforced our project, to promote responsible use of synthetic biology.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- We hypothesized that people generally don’t think gene doping could make sports fairer.
- We thought that people think gene doping should also be accessible to athletes to avoid large discrepancies between athletes and the rest of society.
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.
For the Dutch population this prediction is still relatively close to the 16 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 percent 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.
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.
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 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 per cent believes gene doping can make sports fairer. In The Netherlands 11.2 per cent thinks the same, which is what we expected.
In The Netherlands however, 66.5 per cent 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.
4. Gene Doping Education Athletes
As a response to our debate in Stirling as well as to the athlete interviews, we identified the need for athlete education when it comes to gene doping. Therefore, we contacted the responsible doping authority to discuss the implementation of gene doping education for athletes. The Dutch Doping Authority however indicated that they don’t want to adress it as a separate topic, but see it integrated with the current education material. In Scotland in the mean time, prof. Dimeo and Dr. Henning are continuing the implementation of specific gene doping education.
5. Hackaton
During the hackathon we educated computer scientists on synthetic biology to combine expertise. Approaching biology as a computer system, we created an introductory guide into synthetic biology for computer scientists. The handout can be viewed in the dropdown below. [more to be continued]
6. High School Bioethics Debates
Apart from setting up a platform for answering questions we think it is important to also engage people in synthetic biology. The young have the future and will shape their future. Therefore, we also reached out to several high schools. Not only to enthuse these young students for responsible biotechnology, but also to have an idea about the view of young people on DNA editing. Would they want to use these techniques it if they becomes safe? In setting up the lessons we closely collaborated with Hannah Stammes from the education department of Delft University of Technology. Apart from a presentation about our project, we decided to have one main statement of debate, namely: 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. (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.)
For setting up the lessons we followed the 5E model. This means Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate. 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 this they could explore in their group discussion and source evaluation. 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, whith students passionately defending their opinions against their classmates. We would then 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 would make exogenous EPO undetectable with our initial exon-exon junction based detection idea. We were already deviating from this at the time, but found it a good sign of the conceptual understanding of the students.
7. EurAsian Meetup Bioethics Workshop
geen idee wat voor tekst hierbij hoort?!
8. Hotline
We received many e-mails at the start of our project. This triggered us to create a platform to enable us to most effectively help the iGEM community. We created a Trello based platform open to other future iGEM teams. See our contributions page if you want to see how to create such a platform for your iGEM team.
Museum Youth University
We gave a lecture to primary school children with a live stream. Before and afterwards they were given an object to comment upon. See here their interesting thoughts!