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

To conclude, from the surveys done by our human practice team we could say that most of the public do not know yet about synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is still developing and only students/academia know about it. The public need more exposure and education about synthetic biology because once they know that synthetic biology can be solution of the problems in society, the public response positively.

Questionnaires : Synthetic Biology and EOR for High School Students

We collaborated with Oxford team to conduct a survey about synthetic biology and Enhance Oil Recovery (EOR) on high school students. This survey is aimed at finding out whether they have learnt/ known those topics and their comments related to our project. The responses were varied since the synthetic biology and EOR term might be new for the respondents.

Have you ever learnt/ known about synthetic biology?

The responses were clear that most of the high school students (67%) had never learnt about synthetic biology. This could be due a fact that this term is new for them. Although there were many research in that field, the respondents might be unavailable to access the information since only 33% students that had learnt about that.

Are you interested to study more about synthetic biology?

The majority (88%) of the students we surveyed said that they are interested to study more about synthetic biology. They thought that it was cool and very useful for the future. This means that it is important for them to keep an eye on that field.

If you are interested in the synthetic biology, could you please tell us why? Is it because of your favourite subject or the teacher?

We find out more to analyze the factor that influenced respondents who are interested in synthetic biology. Most of the respondents (73%) are interested since the subject was taught in biology class. Only 18% are keen on learning synthetic biology because of their teacher. It seems like the synthetic biology would be their favourite field in the future.

Have you ever learnt/ known about Enhance Oil Recovery (EOR)?

Since our project focus on Enhance Oil Recovery (EOR), we need to get the responses about this term. About 89% of the students we surveyed had never learnt/ known about EOR. Unfortunately, we did not collect data for whether they thought it was a good thing or not. This could be a question for the later survey.

Do you have any comments/ questions about our project?

The responses were varied because the novelty of our project. We processed the data so that we could get deeper into key points of their comments. Those key points were used to consider our step in developing the project.