Revision as of 15:29, 1 November 2017

The Experts talk

We had the opportunity to discuss our research with senior researchers as well as other students. On September 20th, we talked with Prof. Dirk Stemerding, senior researcher at the Rathenau Instituut (NL), and on September 27th, we could discuss our project with Prof. David Kong, Director of the Community Biotechnology Initiative at MIT Media Lab, Boston.
We are very grateful to have had these discussions because they were really helpful in understanding different aspects of our project, and obtaining interesting suggestions. It is also a pleasure they accepted to insert their names in our wiki for Human Practices!
The main aspect we discussed was about the influence our science art project could have on public opinion. According to Prof. Stemerding, we should have as goal to attract public opinion and make it closer to biotechnology, which is often misunderstood and somehow considered a kind of obscure matter. We will try our best to involve common people and to make them aware of biotechnologies using other strategies such as music, which is an international language that can be easily understood by everyone unlike scientific language. Professor Stemerding told us that our approach to genetical engineering could also sensitize common people (and perhaps make them change their minds) on GMOs and the usage of laboratory animals, even though we are working on bacteria. Eventually, when we asked his opinion about the kind of music we should play with the band “Sound of Coli”, whether an existing melody or something new he promptly exclaimed that it will be definitively better a proper music from Coli, so people will be able to listen directly to the sound of life!
Prof. Kong was very positive that our biotechnology project can sensitize common people to science using the international language of music which is innovative with respect to the visual aspect of science, even though the latter is more powerful. He reckoned that our idea was a really cool novel method to make common people closer to science, and he also said that children could play with it in the future! He also gave us another interesting clue: given that we associate science art, which is visible, to music, we could also be able to bring blind people closer to biotechnology. This being the possibility, we immediately contacted the Blind Institute in Florence and Prato because we were amazed by this new horizon offered by the “simple” E. Coli!

Schools meetings

During the conferences in schools we distributed a first questionnaire before the project presentation and a second one after it. Since we met four different schools and numerous classes, we obtained enough data for a statistic elaboration, such as graphics design and the calculation of affirmative answers percentage in three questions of particular interest:

11) Did we achieve what you think is the science art’s aim?
15) Were you interested in our presentation?
13) Do you think it is morally acceptable to use simple organisms (e.g. bacteria) for art purpose?

In greater detail, we analysed questions number 11 and 15 together (because of their correlation) and question number 13 separately.
The percentages of affirmative answers in 11 and 15 are 87.40% and 92.09%, respectively. We calculated the same kind of percentage for a larger cluster of questions, which included 11, 15 and three more:

In your opinion, how commonly are industries taking advantage of science nowadays?
In your opinion, how much is science important in everyday life?
What do you think about spending finances for science art?

We compared the media of all values (11, 15 and the three more questions) with the percentage of the questions we wanted analyse (11 and 15). Our aim was to reduce the probability that affirmative answers quantity in 11 and 15 was something like a “false positive”, since survey participants often tend to confirm what they consider to be the researcher’s opinion. As you can see from data, question 15 obtained a higher percentage of affirmative questions than the media, so according to this criterion the value 92.09% can be considered more realistic than the others. In contrast, question 11 achieved a slightly lower percentage of affirmative answers than the media, a result that doesn’t improve the veracity of the question, even if it doesn’t devalue the data.

Working in the same way, we compared the affirmative answers percentage of question 13 with a cluster that included 13 and other bioethic (or similar) questions:

Do you think it is useful to invest resources in science art?
Do you think it is morally acceptable to use superior organism (e.g. fishes, cats, rabbits) for art purpose?
Do you think it is morally acceptable to use simple organisms (e.g. bacteria) for science purpose?
Do you think it is morally acceptable to use superior organism (e.g. fishes, cats, rabbits) for science purpose?

The percentage of affirmative answers in the question of interest (13) is clearly higher than the media of all values Furthermore, we were very interested in the discordance of opinions about the use of microorganisms or of complex organisms: such difference becomes more pronounced when the employment of both type of organisms is aimed at scientific art [87.85%], instead of scientific research [79.25%]. Another intriguing data is the percentage of people [4.7%] who agree for using microorganisms for scientific research but not for science art.

Graphic analysis

We carried out a multivariate analysis on the data collected during our project presentation in secondary and high schools. The first graph is referring to the set of questions we asked the students to answer before the presentation: in this multivariate analysis, we associate to each student a specific set of answers and, using the program PAST, we plotted them to investigate whether there was similarity in their answering schemes. Each point in the graph represents a student with his/her set of answers and the distance between the points is linked to the number of answers that are different. The green lines represent the most discriminating questions: the longer the line, the more different the answers. On the other hand, in red is shown the middle value, or the predominant value in the cluster.
As we can see, the points form some clusters, so the students can be divided in different categories, which are their belonging schools. As the first survey is intended to test the students’ background, or their base knowledge, we can infer that the clustering is the result of being in different schools, or even in different classes, because the teacher can influence somehow a student’s opinion or interests.
The second graph is referring to the survey that we gave to the students after the presentation.
In this case, the points don’t form any cluster, showing that there isn’t an evident link between the differences in the answers given by the students and their belonging schools.

We also correlated the answers of secondary school students to those of high school students, creating a "clustering" graph for each part of the survey . Each branch at the bottom of the chart represents a student, represented by the name of the school belonging. The various branches join together at short distances if the answers are very similar or at greater distances if they are less similar. As shown by both charts, higher schools give similar results to each other, and different from the secondary school results.

First Chart

Second Chart

First Branch Chart

Second Branch Chart

Team Unifi

unifi.igem@gmail.com