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 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 -1, there is no 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.