Team:EPF-Lausanne/Survey

Survey

We sent out a survey to try to answer questions mainly about the following two aspects of biology and ethics :

- Association of the level of knowledge with the feelings towards synthetic biology

- Opinion of people on whether they think humans have the right to manipulate genes, and similar issues

Here is the [http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=tfRE0LnWAJbEowo3w7zwFMw Survey]

It consists of 16 little questions, all multiple choices.

The 4 first questions are general information about the person answering the survey (age, sex, education level and scientific background).

Then we have 2 questions about synthetic biology, to see if people know what it is and what kind of concepts they associate with it.

The 4 next questions are here to evaluate the level of knowledge about some basic biologic concepts.

The 6 last questions are here to collect the opinion of people about cloning, whether human have the right to kill animals and similar ethical issues.

Results

We closed the survey on 16th of October, we have 469 answers to the survey.

How old are you?

The majority of our answers come from people between 18 and 21 years old.

What is your sex?

However, we manage to find a pretty representative panel of people in regard to their sex.

What is your study level?

While the majority of asked people have come to the end of high school, we have people with all kind of study levels.

Are you in a scientific domain?

However, most of them come from a scientific area, in a large sense.

Do you know what Synthetic Biology is?
The correlation between being in a scientific domain and knowing what Synthethic Biology gives us -1, which means tehre is no correlation between the two, and being a scientist does not involves a better knowledge of what is syntehtic biology.

Tick 3 words that best explain what is Synthetic Biology

The three most chosen words are:

• Cloning (215 votes = 46%)
• Genetics (317 votes = 68%)
• Engineering (191 votes = 41%)

We have to highlight the fact that GMO is very close with 171 votes (36%). Note that people had to choose 3 words, so the sum of percentages may add to up than 100%.

Do plants have genes?
This question (as the two following ones) intend to evaluate basic knowledges in biology: we were pretty happy to see that people knows for a great majority basic biology.

Brothers and sisters have the same genetic material, only their environment make them differnet: Right or wrong?

All bacteria elicit diseases: Right or wrong?
This question was particularly well answered.

What are GMO?

What is your impression when one says "clonage"?
It is interesting to see that opinion are extremely divided, the majority being either neutral or negative (with up to 40% answers).

Do you think man has the right to manipulate genetic material?

Do you think man has the right to kill animals for scientific research?

What do you think of scientific research in the biology area?

Do you think scientific research is against your religious/cultural principles?

What do you think of using animals for industrial production?

Analysis of the results

We will investigate the relationship between knowledge, opinion and background of the people.