Team:UNIFI/HP/Gold Integrated

• HOME
• TEAM
  • OUR TEAM
  • FLORENCE
  • ATTRIBUTION
• RESEARCH
  • BACKGROUND
  • THEORETICAL BASIS
  • SOFTWARE
• RESULTS
• JOURNAL
• COLLABORATIONS
• HUMAN PRACTICES
  • DELFT
  • PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Human Practices Gold

investigating public perception of biotechnologies

Although some say art is an end in itself, science-art might surely have a variety of goals, for example sensitizing the public to current scientific debates or gifting the public with a different perspective on scientific world. We decided to ask this and other questions to more than two hundred high school and university students and the outcome was very impressive! Many people agreed with the fact science-art mission is to bring the public nearer to science and that such goal is at least sufficiently achieved (88,37% of positive answers). Other goals can be achieved though, as someone suggested, and science is still far from being as known as we think it should be; someone suggested science-art could simply be useful in making people have fun while getting in touch with science, others thought it could instead give a more personal and subjective cut to a field usually seen as absolutely rational and objective.
Many students, 88,78%, stated that they think it is useful to invest resources on science-art, but when it comes to decide which biological processes and techniques should be taken in account, we noticed a change in subject’s opinions; in fact while only 15% of the interviewed declared themselves as absolutely opposed to the usage of any kind of organism in science-art, a quarter declared they would be against science-art made with superior organisms (e.g fishes, plants, mammals etc..); even more interesting is the direct correlation between the number of those who answered negatively to the usage of animals and organisms in science-art and the number of those who wouldn’t take advantage of any organisms neither for scientific purpose (10% of the interviewed wouldn’t use microorganisms, 22% wouldn’t use superior organisms for scientific research). Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, there is a clear similarity in the percentage of those who think science-art is useless or is failing its goals and of those who wouldn’t support a scientific progress gained through animal usage. This latter query brings us to another central question: have we, thanks to our project, succeeded in getting in touch with the most important public of high school students, or in other words, next generation of potential scientists? We directly asked them what were they thinking of our project and our outreach activities and we got a 92% score of appreciation, even though we must consider that statistically when people are asked to give an evaluation to a work done by those that are asking, they tend to give more positive feedback.

Music, not just sounds

Since our project pertain to the interdisciplinary field of science-art, to accomplish our goals we needed not only skills in biology and informatic fields, but also in art, music in particular. We had the opportunity to ask students what they would like our “coli music” to sound like and more than 50% of them replied they would like something aimed at reproducing notes with a ratio and not totally casual. We tried to accomplish this task by enrolling as consultant the musician and student of architecture Samuele del Panta, multi-instrumentalist musician and singer. We preferred a student than a professional musician to express the importance of “fresh minds with fresh ideas” and iGEM is the perfect frame to test the capabilities of young promising minds.
Samuele worked with us during the may of October to establish a ratio with which our software should translate lights to music and his skills and knowledge in musical composition have been crucial for the development of an efficient system to obtain the final informatic pattern for translation; we are all sure the resulting melody will be a pleasure for everyone’s ears!

Team Unifi

unifi.igem@gmail.com