Template:Hong Kong HKUST/summerscienceparty
Medal Requirements
When we started our public engagement, we asked what would be the most challenging thing when we need to talk about synthetic biology to the public? Further idea that branches out is that how can we introduce synthetic biology to small kids? Indeed, in as more as we are absolved into scientific studies, we found ourselves hard to express something difficult like scientific terms to people who has very little background about biology. But nothing is impossible!
We had a blast in workshops introducing DNA models and DNA extraction which is arranged during the "Summer Science Party 2017" and organized by the Hong Kong Science Park. This activity aims to educate children about biology while acting as a platform to converse with parents regarding to their opinions towards synthetic biology.
With our target audience being children from the age of 4 to 12, we hold the believe that we can ignite the interest for biology to children at an early age through fun games. We therefore uses candies as a material to make into 3D DNA model which they can bring it back home afterwards. Unlike the minipreps that we do in our lab, the DNA extraction workshop also involves easy and accessible household objects such as meat tenderizer and ethanol so children can try out the same experiment with different fruits to compare their DNA amount, imprinting them with first impression and a growing interest for biology at the developmental age.
Throughout the workshops, we were able to receive instant feedbacks from parents regarding to their understanding of synthetic biology and genetically modified organisms. With more than 75 participants in the survey, 58% claimed to have knowledge about GMOs. Within this group of participants, 63% knows that genes inside the organism is changed, while an equal percent of participants also think that GMOs greatly affects the ecosystem. 54% of the people voiced GMO will negatively affect human health.
However, these responses contradicts to our research findings prior to the events. There is no valid proof that GM food is harmful to human health. Our team realized that this misconceptions and bias can be an important barrier to the advancement of synthetic biology, so we had tried to educate or event participants further throughout our project introduction and posted articles on synthetic biology on local science FaceBook page.
We also got feedbacks asking opinions about our project, which some parents were interested and spent time discussing with us at our booth.
From this feedbacks, we were able to draft out an idea how our future project would look like. We sought to interview with Prof. Terrence Lau who is knowledgeable about current GMOs situation in Hong Kong. It is also a surprise that GMO papaya is actually very common in Hong Kong, while our survey conveys that people know GMOs in a broad sense, but not the GMOs that surround them.
Throughout the interview, we sparked another similar idea that we can also tackle, which is the Genetic Containment Strategy, where we also care about preventing accidental release of the genetically engineered organisms, and we sought more in-depth detail about how to improve our construct to Prof. Matthew Bennett
