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 there 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?




This is the question that was the least well answered. 52 persons picked the wrong answer. There was 82 persons coming from an non-scientific area, which means that at least one third of them had some basic genetic knowledge and could answer this question.

All bacteria elicit diseases: Right or wrong?

This question was particularly well answered. It seems that people mostly know that there are some commensal bacteria.

What are GMO?


63% of the answers were Transgenic organisms. Then comes Organisms resulting from the mating of different species with 17%, Plants which have had their growth rate optimized with 11%, then Modified organisms that contaminate natural species got 8% of the answers. Finally we had still 1% of answers Containers containing a compressed video flux and/or an OGG audio flux (which is a true answer !!).

What is your impression when one says "cloning"?

It is interesting to see that opinion are extremely divided, the majority being either neutral or negative (with 41% of the answers). Then comes the negative impression with 37% and finally only 22% of the people had a positive impression when they hear the word cloning.

Do you think that humans have the right to manipulate genetic material?

53% of the people thought "rather yes", then we have 21% of "rather no", 15% of "yes, absolutely", 5% of "absolutely not" and 5 % of "I don't have an opinion on the subject". Again we have a divided opinion on the subject, it would be interesting to see the correlation between the age or the scientific area (or not) and this opinion.

Do you think that humans have the right to kill animals for scientific research?

Again the opinion is very distributed, with 37% of "Rather yes", 30% of "Rather no", 14% of "Absolutely not", 13% of "Yes, absolutely" and 5% of "I don't have an opinion on the subject". It is interesting to see that, compared to see the last question, we have significantly more "Absolutely not" and less "Rather yes". It seems that the animal cause is still a sensitive subject for certain person !

Do you think that scientific research in the field of biology is:


The answers to this question were mostly divided into two : 54% of "Good, if one puts limits to it and it remains under control" and 42% of "Necessary, to understand the world around us". Then comes "Dangerous, because it could go too far" with 3% and 1% "Useless and innessential, our money could be better used elsewhere". Thus, very few people are totally against research and most of them understand that it is important... 54% think it is very important to control it very well and 42% just think it is necessary.

Do you think that scientific research in the field of biology goes against your religious/cultural principles?


53% of the answers were "Not at all", 26% "Rather no" and 11% "I don't have an opinion on the subject". Then it is interesting to see that there is still 7% of "Rather yes" and 2% of "Yes, absolutely", which makes a total of 46 persons that see some conflicts between scientific research and their religious/cultural principles. It will be interesting to see who is this population.

What do you think of the act of using the living to ends of industrial production?



Here more than one answer was possible. The answers were very variable. We got 59% of "Laws are necessary to control it", 39% of "It is good, but only in certain cases", 28% of "It's useful", 20% of "It's dangerous", 14% of "It's immoral", 13% of "It's necessary", and 8% of "I don't have an opinion on the subject".

Analysis of the results

We will investigate the relationship between knowledge, opinion and background of the people. To do this analysis, we used the excel functions, as the result of our survey is in the excel form.

The value we looked at is the correlation. Based on wikipedia, "In statistics, correlation (often measured as a correlation coefficient, ρ) indicates the strength and direction of a relationship between two random variables. The commonest use refers to a linear relationship. In general statistical usage, correlation or co-relation refers to the departure of two random variables from independence. In this broad sense there are several coefficients, measuring the degree of correlation, adapted to the nature of the data."

If the correlation coefficient is close to 1, it means the data are correlated, there is a dependance between the two of them. If it is close to 0, there is no correlation. If it is close to -1, there is an opposite correlation.

Scientific background and level of knowledge

We first attributed a score to scientific background : if the person answers Yes, we attribute a score of 1. If he/she says no, we attribute a score of 0. For the knowledge, we also attributed a score to the level of knowlegde. We looked at 4 questions : Do plants have gene?, Brothers and sisters have the same genetic material, only their environment make them different: Right or wrong?, All bacteria elicit diseases: Right or wrong?, and What are GMO?. If the answer was right, we gave 1 point, if it was wrong (or I don't know) 0 point. At the end we added the scores of the 4 questions and we get a "knowledge score". We can then compare the knowledge score to the scientific background, using the correlation.

Our result is : ρ = 0.139888659

It means there is a little dependance between the knowledge and the scientific background, but not as much as we thought. It can come from the fact that some high school students of 15 years old can be oriented in a scientific domain but they haven't studied this kind of knowledge yet.

Scientific background and opinion

We first looked at the answers to the questions : Do you think that humans have the right to manipulate genetic material? We looked at the correlation between a scientific orientation (if yes, +1, if no 0), and the opinion (if the answer is Yes absolutely or Rather yes, +1, otherwise 0).

Our result is : p = 0.137740666. So there is almost no correlation between these two factors, even if we can say that scientists have a tendancy to have a positive opinion.

Then we can look at the question : Do you think that humans have the right to kill animals for scientific research? The system of scoring is the same.

The result is : p = 0.072194557. There is almost no correlation between the two factors there.

We also looked at the opinion about cloning. A positive opinion gives a 1, a neutral or negative opinion a 0. As a result, we got p = 0.11517346. So there is a very small correlation, again scientists have a tendancy to have a positive opinion about it but isn't very significant.

Finally, the question Do you think that scientific research in the field of biology goes against your religious/cultural principles?. A Not at all and rather no gives a 1, the rest a 0. The correlation is p = 0.011483668. So there is no correlation.

Sex and opinion

Then we wondered if there was a certain type of correlation between the sex and certain opinion. For example, it could be believed that woman are more attached to some sentimental causes such as the animal one.

We looked at the question Do you think that humans have the right to kill animals for scientific research?. If the person answering was a woman, we put +1 and if it is a man 0. If the answer is Rather no or Absolutely we put +1. The correlation is : 0.194965015. So there a small tendancy : more than half of the woman think that humans don't have the right to kill animals for scientific research.

Age and knowledge

We could also think that older people answer better the question. We will thus do the correlation between the younger group age and the bad responses. If a person is between 14-17 years old, it give 1 point otherwise 0. If the knowledge score is less than 4, it also gives one point (otherwise 0). p = 0.023350723. So there is almost no correlation.

Sex and knowledge

Do women have less knowledge in science ?? A knowledge score < 4 is correlated with being a woman. We find :

p = 0.12600463

So there is no correlation between being a woman and being less aware in sciences.

If we compute the correlation coefficient between being a man and have a knowledge score <4, we get p = -0.12600463 (which is logical). So a less extended knowledge in sciences is more correlated with being a woman, even if it isn't very significant.

Knowledge of what is synthetic biology and opinions

As we have seen before, the correlation between some opinions and an orientation in a scientific domain is not as high as we expected. This could be due to the fact that the "orientation in a scientific area" is a very broad term. For example, students of 15 years that took as option mathematics and physics (but only had a month of these classes) would answer yes to this question, but they don't have a full scientific formation... Here we will rather do the correlation between the people that know what synthetic biology (hoping they didn't pick yes randomly) and their opinion.

First : if the people know what synthetic biology is, it gives a +1 point, if they don't know 0 point. Then if they have a positive opinion about cloning, it gives a +1, or neutral or negative opinion gives a 0. The result is : p = 0.111878207. It is slightly lower than the 0.11517346 of the correlation with the scientific orientation. As very few people know what synthetic biology is, maybe they only know it by chance (family member part of iGEM, read it in a newspaper,...) but it is apparently not a good indicator of "scientific opinion".

Conclusion

We see that the opinions are very divided in the major questions we asked. Even if over than 80% of the participants were oriented in a scientific domain, they don't all have positive opinion about cloning, they don't all think that humans have the right to manipulate genetic material etc. So we have very diverse opinions !

We were surprised that as many people answered correctly to the knowledge questions.

No major correlations were discovered : even if being in a scientific domain "predisposes" to certain opinions, this is not strongly the case. It is the same for all the other relationships we thought would occur between different age groups, sex or orientation. So globally, we can conclude that clichés aren't always true! Indeed, many people might imagine that biologists would think that cloning is less of an issue, just because they deal with cloning daily. From this survey, however, we can see that this is not necessarily true: the area in which people work perhaps shows what they are interested in, but it apparently doesn't change their beliefs and convictions. In general, it is a rather reassuring conclusion, it demonstrates that scientifics remain critical towards what they are working on, and that they do understand the issues that might arise from areas such as synthetic biology.