Gold

Human Practice

Human Practice has always been a crucial part of an IGEM project. In order to establish integrated human practice with enough social engagement, we performed the following tasks.

Gold

Online Media

At the beginning of the project, we set up a Wechat official account, a form of online media, where our team posted articles that introduce concept and knowledge relating to our project. The official account was run by one team member and articles about introduction of lab safety, team member introduction, and interview with a doctor at Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan, an article about what is colorectal cancer, and an article talks about synthetic biology as well as our team’s project.

*Zhongnan Hospital is a hospital run by Wuhan University. Its whole name is Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University.

Presentations

During our visit in Hangzhou, we did a presentation to students from Yiling Middle School in Zhejiang University. As this is also a part of collaboration, the participated teams talked about different aspects of IGEM competition. Our team focused on the introduction of our project through explaining what is colorectal cancer and mechanism of how microRNA controlling gene expression as well as cell cycle. Later we went to the Zhejiang Science Museum to introduce our project and the competition to the public. We hand out fans with information about colorectal cancer, tell the tourists about the project, and we designed games relating to science for the younger children to play. The process of handing out the fans and talking to tourists involves a lot of social interaction where we get to know about people’s attitude toward cancer related projects.

Survey

To better understand the public opinion, a survey was designed after returning from Hangzhou. The first version was released and received 333 responses. A second modified version was released with changes in the descriptions and choices of the questions so to avoid the equivocation occurred in the first one. The second version is translated into English version as well, and they were posted in the IGEM community as a collaboration request. However, the sample space is unsatisfactory with only 10 responses in total. After all, the survey provided us with information about the public opinion from their knowledge on colorectal cancer to their expectations of the treatments. The survey intended to leave free response in many of the questions to avoid limiting the choice of response, and we did get a few interesting answers on some of the questions, showing different perspective of different people.

There are 3 versions of questionnaires, even though the questions haven’t change much, the consolidation of the result is quite hard since adjustments have been made to the expressions.

In sum, among the 342 responses, 47 of them haven’t heard of colorectal cancer before, and among the 218 people who have heard of the disease, only 37 of them have knowledge about it.

Most of them do not have relatives or friends being suffered from it, however still 80 out of 342 reported having this case.

The most painful parts of having a cancer for most responses are the fact that many patients failed to discover their illness at the early stage of tumor development as well as inability to cure or even treat the disease. Other also chose the choice: physical pain brought by the disease.

However, analyzing the part about attitude toward current diagnosis techniques. Most people do not have a clear idea about the pros and cons of the techniques along with problems with sample spaces. The Chinese version mainly focuses on the experience and the cost. While the English version focuses on experience and privacy. Sample space from second trial is too small to make solid conclusion while comparing the results in the three surveys, the dominant answer choices are different reflecting certain degree of diversification between different group of people. If this project wants to fully develop into clinical uses, further surveys on public opinion have to be made and released between different groups of people.

Clearly, accuracy and efficiency is quite prevailing when asked about the future direction of developing techniques of diagnosis.

And most people think that the development in cancer related treatments should be more focused on methods of curing or at least alleviating, the disease and its diagnosis.