Team:ITB INDONESIA/humprac/questionnaires

Questionnaires : Synthetic Biology and Public’s Opinion

Synthetic biology is a quite new thing in Indonesia and the public probably still unfamiliar with it. So, instead of asking public about our project; how it might affect society and vice versa, our human practice focusing to how much Indonesian (Bandung citizens to be excact) know about synthetic biolohy and how are their opinion on synthetic biology in topic that closely related to them. The surverys done in weekly Car Free Day events in Dago and in sport field where people usually gather every weekend with respondents varies from teenagers to young adults to adults.

Environment

One of topics that easily found in society and related to synthetic biology is environment. We did several suverys based on this topic, and develop it to know how is the public opinion about current environmental issue (focusing in pollution) and how synthetic biology could involve in this issue. Beside that,we also want to see general profile of how much public recognize synthetic biology itself. The respondents involved in this survey are 136 persons.

In your opinion, what kind of pollution that happened most frequent?What are the sources of that pollution?

As we can see in the Figure 1, majority of the respondents answer water is the pollution that happen the most often in society, followed by soil and air pollution. The wordcloud below (generated from: https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/#%2F%2Fwww.jasondavies.com%2Fwordcloud%2Fabout%) display respondent’s opinion with the size of the letter of a word is equal with its frequency of the word being mentioned during the survey. The most mentioned source of environmental problems are industrial waste, domesticwaste, waste in general, and garbage management If we look back at the respondents’s profile, the result potrays the environmental problem in urban society, especially in Bandung.

Fig.1 Pollution that occurs often in respondent’d opinion

Fig.2 The most common cause of environmental problem

Synthetic biology’s role: Do you know about synthetic biology? Do you think syntetic biology can solve the problem?

After asking respondent’s opinion about environmental problem around them, we triend to find out how well known synthetic biology is among the respondent. In the Figure, we can see that more people haven’t know yet about synthetic biology, but the number of respondent that already recognize synthetic biology is not that small with the difference about 10 respondents. This means that synthetic biology is started to be known among public.

Fig.3 Respondent’s recogniton on synthetic biology

Fig.4 Respondent’s opinion on wether synthetic biology could be solution to the environmental problem

Healthcare

As there are still a lot of Indonesia regions which are not really clean, we would like to hear the public point of view about this, the diseases correlating to the environment. Therefore, for our third and fourth survey, we had a dialogue with the public about synthetic biology application for healthcare. The human practice team and several members from the other division were divided into two groups. We approached the public one by one and had a discussion with them.

What is the most frequent disease that related to environment?

From all of the 37 respondents, most of them answered diarrhea, followed by flu and skin diseases. In addition, the public thought that the main cause of the diseases are bacteria. The following wordcloud (generated from: http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.html) shows the distribution of the answer.

Fig.5 The most frequent disease in unhygienic environment (left) and the cause of the disease (right)

Do you know about synthetic biology and that those diseases could be treated utilizing synthetic biology?

After having dialogue about the diseases, we then proceeded to the next question, about synthetic biology. Around 70% of the respondents whom we asked do not know about synthetic biology and the rest know about it.

Fig.6 Public’s recognition on synthetic biology

Questionnaire : What do Students Interested in Synthetic Biology Think?

If you could utilize synthetic biology to solve problem in one field, which field would you choose?

We already did survey to public about how synthetic biology might involved in two fields: health and environment because these issues can relate easier to the respondent has some urgency. After that, we want to know if people who are interested and even might involved in synthetic biology think the same: which field they are feeling related/concerned to? Every year, ITB holds an event called Open House Unit (OHU) where the students choose and register to the clubs. This year, Synthetic Biology (SynBio) club opened for the first time. Most of them joined the club in order to improve their knowledge and find experience. Surprisingly, all of the students had ever heard about iGEM. There were more than 150 students registered for the club. So, the human practice team was curious and we had 15 students whom registered to fill in our short questionnaire. The charts showed the answers. Most of the respondents choose to tackle the issue of healthcare, followed by food, energy, and environment. It looks like healthcare takes the utmost priority. So, the fields we choose as the topics for surveys that we did fits with what member of Synthetic Biology Club’s general opinion.

Final statement: So, what do public think about synthetic biology?

Describe Synthetic Biology in one or two words

In the end of every survey,we asked our respondents to give one or two words that popped out in their mind that describes synthetic biology . We want to find out how Synthetic Biology is percieved in the public’s mind. As we can see, public associate synthetic biology with engineering and genetics, and the public see synthetic biology as a solution and a good thing. We even have a pretty interesting response such as “playing god” whlile some of the respondents are giving response like “don’t understand” and “complicated”.

Fig.7 Impression about synthetic biology