HUMAN PRACTICE

Surveying the Land

The team wanted to get a preview of how our idea would be perceived by the general public. To this end, we created an online survey, the goal of which was to get a better understanding of what the general public knows about GMOs and probiotics. The survey was structured to gradually give more information about GMOs and probiotics, measure initial comfort levels with these concepts, and measure their williness to support them afterwards. The people who took the survey ranged from 18 to 50+ years old and had an education background ranging from high school to advanced profession degrees. The survey can be found here.Please feel free to continue to contribute to it and expand our dataset! In addition, we acknowledge the fact that our sample size may be skewed towards people who are already interested in synthetic biology based on how we advertised it (through the team and personal forms of social media), but the information gleaned from the data we collected is still rather useful and allows us to be more insightful.

So, what exactly did we find out from our survey? Well for one, as the graph to the right shows, on a scale from 1-5 with 5 being the most comfortable, 58.3% of people has a comfort level less than or equal to 3. This confirms our suspicion that most people are not all too comfortable with the ideas of GMOs. From here, we tell the survey taker that genetically modified bacteria are used to produce insulin and a range of antibiotics to demonstrate a useful function. With this, as the pie chart to the left reveals, 14.5% of people stated that they are more supportive of GMOS, but for the most part (79% of the sample size), people's opinion remained the same and 6% of the people were more opposed to it afterwards. This tells us that it is going to take much more than the fact that GMOs already have some useful functions in society to have them support new applications of synthetic biology. Thus, it is important in the future to consider what synthetic biologists should do to garner more support for their cause and to assess what the public fears and support about GMO.

When asked about probiotics, the results show that 27.4% of the population do not know what it is. To help inform our survey takers, we explain that probiotics are live bacteria that are shown to be good for one's digestive health by supporting the beneficial bacteria in the gut and can be found in food such as yougurt, kefir, and miso. ]Given this information, 85.7% felt as if they have a better understanding of what probiotics are. When asked how comfortable they were with consuming probiotic from a scale from 1-5, 71.4% reported a comfort level greater than or equal to 4 as shown on the right.