Overview
It is invalid to implement education hastily without prior investigation and understanding. Instead of forced science popularization, we chose targeted science popularization. So the Pastry Mode in integrated human practices is also applied to our education.
Pastry Mode is a loop mode from a large range (plane) to a specific (point)，which symbolizes coming from the masses and going back to the masses. Because plane and point spell the same as pastry in Chinese,we affectionately call it Pastry Mode. In education, we define the four parts as:
- 1. Survey: Conduct extensive surveys to understand what science needs popularization and how to do it;
- 2. Analysis: Analyze the survey results and determine the object and content of science popularization.
- 3. Implementation: Carry out implementation education on the part we and analyze.
- 4. Reflection: Reflect and summarize according to the feedback of actual implementation , so as to conduct better education in the future.
Figure 1. Our Pastry Mode in Education &Communication
Moreover, Pastry Mode requires us to make reflections after our implementation, so as to do it better the next time. In this way,we can establish two-way dialogues with the public.
Under the guidance of Pastry Mode, we have mainly done three things:
- Understand people's ideas and prejudices behind science and carry out targeted education.
- Explore the popularization path of synthetic biology in China.
- Make an attempt to carry out effective education for stakeholders.
On our page, you can see how our interesting educational activities were carried out, how we reflected, and the interesting results. We learned a lot from this tortuous, imperfect journey of exploration in education, and we believe that you may also get inspiration after browsing it!
Against Prejudice
Introduction
In China, people share articles from official accounts or short Tiktok videos on wechat groups. We found that our elders like to share some public accounts and videos related to healthy living, but most of them are wrong. These articles and videos can reflect some deep-rooted prejudices of people - and that inspired the idea of doing Education Against Prejudice.
Before the project was confirmed, we conducted scientific education on the prejudice of synthetic biology. After the project was confirmed, we carried out relevant educational activities on the topic of pesticides and genetically modified crops related to our project.
We learned about possible prejudices in people's minds through collection of art creations and street interviews. According to our analysis, we then carried out targeted science popularization activities. We also found some interesting phenomena, which will be mentioned in the Reflection section of this part.
1. Survey
1.1 Collecting Ideas in the Form of Art Creations
With the theme of Imagine-Synthetic Bioworld, we tried to know about the views of college students on the world of synthetic biology by collecting their art creations. These art creations included transgenic food, clinical application of synthetic biology, application imagination and ethical discussion. Based on the collection of art creations and the author's description of them, we got a sense of how people think about synthetic biology.
Figure 2. Tweet for Collecting Art Creations
Figure 3. A Part of Excellent Works
1.2 Street Interview
We want to know the public's perception with biopesticides, chemical pesticides and genetically modified crops, so we designed a set of brief questionnaires for face-to-face interviews, so as to collect the results that we wanted to know in the most efficient way. We went on the streets in Shenzhen to do the interviews and at the end we had interviewed 192 people（both online and offline）to learn their preference of biopesticides, chemical pesticides and genetically modified crops.
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When you buy rice, would you prefer the more expensive but relatively healthy biopesticide or the less expensive chemical pesticide treated rice? |
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Which do you prefer, genetically modified rice or rice sprayed with biopesticides, for the same anti-insect benefits? |
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Figure 4. Results of Street Interview
2. Analysis
In the collection of Imagine-Synthetic Bioworld artistic works, we found that most college students' understanding of synthetic biology remains at a relatively preliminary stage. They don't know enough about genetic modification, and they simply equate synthetic biology with gene editing. Even a few people have biases and misconceptions about gene editing.
In street interviews, we found that more than half of the population chose to buy rice treated with biopesticides rather than GM rice. There was even a man in the process of our interview showing extremely strong resistance to the GMO. To some extent, these phenomena can prove that GMO is stigmatized in our country and correct educational guidance is needed.
3. Implementation
3.1 Implementation of Prejudice in Synthetic Biology
Imagine-Synthetic Bioworld Art Collection
Because we found the limitations of college students' understanding of transgenic technology and synthetic biology in Imagine-Synthetic Bioworld activity, we created an online "building" activity. All entries were placed in a document, and everyone could comment on them. In the process, we tried to educate them through comments. For example, there was a student whose work described genetically modified technology turning engineer genes into lethal biological weapons. Our comment below is “Technology is neutral and sinless. How to use technology for the development of humanity is a topic we will never change.” It's also worth mentioning that we printed out an art collection of all the artworks and reviews.
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Figure 5. Imagine-Synthetic Bioworld Art Collection
Lectures for College Students
Because we found the limitations of college students' understanding of transgenic technology and synthetic biology in the process of Imagine-Synthetic Bioworld, we held lectures on transgenic technology and synthetic biology for college students. In this lecture, we explained what synthetic biology is, what parts it contains, and how people use it to change the world. We also showed the positive side of transgenic technology to college students and popularized its safety guidelines. Our audience showed great interest in synthetic biology after listening to our lecture, which proves that our lecture is effective.
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Figure 6. Presentation at the Lecture
3.2 Implementation of Prejudice in Pesticide & Modified Crop
Supplementary Education during Street Interview
In the process of street interviews, we got answers from people of different ages and occupations. We immediately analyzed and thought about them according to their answers. Then we made different supplementary answers for different people about the concept of biopesticides. Most people said that our introductions were really useful for them, which reduced their misunderstandings about genetic engineering and strengthened their concern about green agriculture. Click here to see the details
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Figure 7. Supplementary Education during Street Interview
Pesticide Science Lecture for Senior High School Students
Since we had the opportunity to cooperate with CUHKSZ to organize an educational activity, we decided to hold a science lecture for high school students from Shenzhen Foreign Language School based on our findings on street interview. In this scientific popularization, we hope to deepen their understanding of pesticides.
Before the presentation, we asked the high school students to fill out a questionnaire, and the results were unexpected. High school students were more likely to choose the controversial GM rice, which was the opposite of the street interview. In the lecture, we talked about the history of human resistance to diseases and pests, the differences, advantages and disadvantages between biological pesticides and chemical pesticides. We also carried out scientific popularization on the merit and demerit of transgenic crops, RNA pesticides, and their future security risks.
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Figure 8. Presentation at the Meeting
At the end of the lecture, we asked high school students to fill out the questionnaire again. Luckily, the feedback showed that our scientific popularization is meaningful and effective.
4. Reflection
Although we saw a lot of imaginative works in the art collection, we also found that people's understanding of genetically modified food is not enough, especially for our policy on genetically modified food. For example, tomatoes and papayas are the only genetically modified crops allowed on the market in China, but the students' works actually showed strawberries, corn and other foods on the shelf, which is impossible in reality. At the same time, we also found that people's views on genetic engineering in the works are mostly negative, which may be due to the Gene-Edited Baby Incident in China in 2018.
An amazing point is that in the street interview, people had a great degree of resistance to transgenic rice (only 3.2% out of people chose transgenic rice), but in the education of high school students, we can see that most students chose transgenic rice (76.2%). Although the size of our sample was not large, it can still represent a portion of people's views. Also, in combination with the examples of our relatives and friends, we can find the differences among generations: the previous generation is often more resistant to GM rice, while teenagers have a high tolerance for GM rice. The phenomenon of resisting GM rice and even all GM food in the older generation may come from some fake science popularization in China. Meanwhile, teenagers will naturally have a higher tolerance for genetically modified rice after taking biology courses. What's more interesting is that after we taught them about Chinese policies on genetically modified crops, which are only two kinds of genetically modified rice that are allowed to be grown in our country, and neither of them can be sold, they changed their tendency.
And we gained the following reflections:
- Different sources and levels of knowledge lead to different perceptions. This also shows the importance of not doing forced popularization. It is very important to know the opinions of the public in advance and carry out targeted education.
- In China, most people are too negative about gene editing, influenced by the Incident of Gene-Edited Baby. In gene editing related content, there should be more positive science popularization. People do not know much about synthetic biology, and students majoring in biology also roughly equate synthetic biology with gene editing.
- The popularization of relevant policies is often missed, but people need to know about it. We can see that high school students changed their preference after they learned about the policies related to GM rice, so it is very important to popularize related policies.
- Prejudice in people's minds may be as hard to change as moving a mountain, but with a little effort accumulating, it can be changed. Just like the generation difference we mentioned above, strengthening popular science education for children and teenagers is a very good way to eliminate the common prejudice.
- Our scientific popularity scope is relatively small. We hope that in the future, some teams can explore and discover the prejudice around them, and explore how to conduct science popularization in a wider range.
In Synthetic Biology
Introduction
In the Education Against Prejudice part, we found that even students majoring in biology would equate gene editing with synthetic biology. This phenomenon just goes to show that the popularity of synthetic biology in China is very scarce. At the same time, as mentioned in our reflection in the previous part, strengthening scientific popularization for children and adolescents is a very good way to eliminate the general prejudice, so we decided to carry out our science popularization and education of synthetic biology for students at all stages.
In order to better carry out the science popularization, we interviewed Mrs. Liu, a teacher who majored in normal education, as well as Pro.Wang, who carried out the synthetic biology course. They provided many useful suggestions for us to better carry out scientific popularization activities. Because of these two interviews, our original plan became clearer:
- High school students and college students become our key educational target object. We started from learning the curriculum standards of biology for high school students, and carried out extended courses of synthetic biology according to the gaps and omissions in textbooks.
- For junior high school students, we gave priority to the education method of brief introduction. We have made a synthetic biology pamphlet which is in line with the knowledge scope of junior high school students, and illustrated the interesting and significant incidents of synthetic biology to them.
- For primary school students, we focused on stimulating their interest and let them experience the fun of exploration and hands-on experiments through simple experimental operations.
Finally, you can see the problems we have encountered and our experience and perception in the Reflection section.
1. Survey
In order to carry out our education of students at all stages, we purposefully interviewed two special teachers: Lecturer Liu, who majored in normal education and Professor Wang, who set the innovative short courses of synthetic biology.
We hoped to learn from the former how to educate the students and from the latter how to design our classes.
1.1 How To Educate
Mrs. Liu's class is accessible, humorous and impressive. In addition to her experience as a normal major student, we decided to ask her: how to avoid meaningless biology education? Mrs. Liu gave us very valuable answers. The lack of understanding of synthetic biology shown by people of all ages is ultimately the result of a lack of education. High school is the main time for teenagers to learn biology systematically. Therefore, Mrs. Liu recommended that we should read high school biology textbooks and biology curriculum standards to check whether the content of synthetic biology education is sufficient. Then, Mrs. Liu believed that there are great differences and barriers between high school and college learning content, so it is necessary to carry out transitional courses. Click to see the details
Figure 9. Meeting with Mrs. Liu
1.2 How To Design
To get more advice on course design, we interviewed Professor Wang, who runs a short innovative course on synthetic biology. To our surprise, Professor Wang not only shared his thoughts on the curriculum provision, but also gave us many opinions on educational activities. For example, we may have had a lot of preconceived concerns when we started our last project, Imagine—Synthetic Bioworld. But It is significant to be optimistic when introducing such sensitive and hot topics. In addition, we have benefited a lot from his "three cores" theory, and thought it could also be applied to the education of primary and junior high school students. Click to see more details
Figure 10.Meeting with Professor Wang
2. Analysis
2.1 Analysis of Biological Textbooks For High School Students
According to Mrs.Liu's suggestion, we simply read the high school biology textbooks and biology curriculum standards. From there we found that although the introduction of synthetic biology related technology exists in the textbook, it is scattered. We understand that there are many factors that need to be taken into account in the design of textbooks, so we decided to provide as much complementary education as possible to high school students and systematically introduce them to synthetic biology.
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Figure 11.The Biology Course Standard & Biology Textbook
2.2 The Spiritual Core of Professor Wang Yu
Among the "three cores” theory proposed by professor, the third one "Imagination is important" has given us a lot of inspiration. The continuous development of science and technology is not based on expensive equipment, but on the creativity and imagination of the human brain, which is really rare and precious. So having the courage to think, and to seize on those flashes of inspiration, can be the first step to success. Children have an imagination that is unmatched by adults. Therefore, we believe that the "core" can also be applied to the education of primary and junior high school students. Our education will be aimed at stimulating their interest in synthetic biology and retaining as much of their precious imagination as possible.
3. Implementation
3.1 Science and Technology Museum Science Popularization Activities
Because of our partnership with NJU-China, we jointly planned a science popularization activity for primary school students in Nanjing Science and Technology Museum. The activity aims at popularizing the knowledge of biology and health-related knowledge, stimulating the interest of primary school students in biology and exercising their practical ability.
In the activity, the children not only completed the experiment of maize DNA extraction with some simple props, but also gave full play to their imagination to doodle with the theme of "healthy life and good habits". We were pleased to know that most of the children are enthusiastic about these events. Let more children have an impression on, or even interested in biology, is the original intention of our activity planning.
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Figure 12.Science Popularization Activities in Science and Technology Museum
3.2 Promote Synthetic Biology
In March of this year, we reached a consensus on cooperation with SUSTech-Shenzhen. In order to let the junior high school students have a better understanding of synthetic biology, we decided to make an interesting pamphlet together, consisting of simple and easy-to-understand basic knowledge of synthetic biology. It is called The Way to SynBio.
We took the pamphlet to Taoyuan Middle School in Shenzhen and distributed it to students there for reading. Although they had difficulty understanding parts of the content, they showed interest in it. Because they started to think about the possible future benefits of synthetic biology. We also distributed it widely around the school, to give more people a chance to learn about synthetic biology and address their fears about genetic engineering.
Figure 13.Kids Love Our Pamphlets!
3.3 High School Teams to Our Lab！
We welcome all high school students interested in synthetic biology to come and talk to us. Therefore, after learning that many high schools in Shenzhen do not have standard laboratories, we opened our lab to some high school students and invited them to visit and study.
During the visit, we emphasized the specifications of experiments, introduced the protocol of basic instruments, and shared our project. In turn, we constantly adjusted the content and method of our education according to the feedback after the visit of high school students. This was a very interesting process because they often ask about some problems that we have ignored, bringing us new inspiration and thinking. We were also amazed by the young people's sensitivity and talent for synthetic biology and look forward to their future contributions in this field.
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Figure 14.High school students in our lab
3.4 Extended Courses
Following Mrs. Liu's advice, we decided to provide a transitional education for freshmen students who study biology after the college entrance examination. So we provided them with extended classes. We prepared this activity very carefully and prepared the corresponding educational materials to assist.
Firstly, based on the analysis of high school biology textbooks and biology curriculum standards, we carried out popular science education for them. Although the introduction of synthetic biology related technology exists in the textbook, it is scattered. So, we systematically introduced synthetic biology to them. The content included the meaning of synthetic biology, its history, current hot technologies and our project. It was not difficult for them to understand some of the knowledge because they had already learned it in high school.
Second, we presented them with the Imagine-Synthetic Bioworld and The Way To Synbio pamphlets. These two were used as supplementary reading materials to stimulate their thinking and interest in synthetic biology. We found that students were clearly more interested in the Imagine-Synthetic Bioworld Art Collection.
Finally, we let them play a card game we designed called Smash Strains, which requires players to build genetic pathways to keep their strains alive. In order to determine whether our card game is user friendly, we invited students to play cards and give their opinions. We designed the cards in this way to subtly let players learn the process of gene pathway and functional expression, and popular science commonly used chassis bacteria and their characteristics. The students liked the cards we designed very much and asked if we could sell them!
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Figure 15.Developing the Extended Courses
3.5 Tweets in WeChat Official Account
Because the iGEM competition is the best way to understand synthetic biology, our team carefully selected 12 very interesting projects for interpretation. While explaining the relevant knowledge of synthetic biology, it also shows the charm of synthetic biology.
Figure 16.Official Account of SZU-China
Figure 17.Well-designed Cover Layout
In addition to sending tweets about excellent project analysis, we also used our official account to update our real-time competition news and reports on various activities carried out. From laboratory visits, research and interviews, to the tweets of the Southern China Regional Meeting and even our Promotion Video releases were all tweeting in order.
Figure 18.Other Tweets
4. Reflection
It is difficult to have the approaches to carry out the education of the target group, which is a big problem that we meet. For pre-college students, there is often a tight schedule at school, and there may be piles of homework and cram schools after school. As a result, schools rarely open educational and popular science channels to the outside world. Moreover, even if we communicate well with the school and can start the course, we often have to go through a complicated approval process, as well as constant confirmation and inspection. Therefore, it is relatively difficult to carry out popular science education activities in China.
We also find that in China, there is relatively little contact between the public and scientific researchers, and lack of communication approaches between the public and scientific workers. The lack of such approaches is one of the reasons why it is difficult for our national science popularization to be put into full play.
Therefore, we have summarized several effective methods (for student groups) to get the approaches based on our activities. We hope these methods can help other iGEM teams in China when they encounter the same problem.
- Carrying out educational activities at universities is relatively easy. It is good to hold lectures and cooperate with associations to do the popularization, and the forms can be quite varied.
- If you want to implement educational activities for high school and middle school students, you can contact your former teachers. You'll have a better chance of success than simply contacting someone in the office.
- If there is no channel, you can contact students or teachers of teachers-education around you. They often have the opportunity to go to a school to do the internship, so you can get the approaches of communication with the school through them.
- It is also a good way to co-plan and hold activities with the Science Museum. The museum itself will provide the chance to hold scientific activities on a regular basis. At the same time, the event can be well publicized by Science Museum.
Educational Materials Appendix
The card game that the students tried to play in Extended Courses is a game designed by ourselves and made based on knowledge of synthetic biology.
In the game, players will play as different strains and use a variety of gene expressions to attack other strains in order to satisfy the conditions for victory. In the design process, we specifically integrated various biological introductions and concepts so that everyone can better understand the mechanism of gene pathway expression and the characteristics of different strains.
For example, if you want to express different genes, you need to play a card with the promoter and terminator to successfully express the gene, simply playing the gene card is noneffective. This logic is in line with the realistic conditions of gene expression. We also wrote their specific characteristics on the different strain cards. Based on these characteristics, we gave those strain cards some unique skills, allowing the player to understand the characteristics of each strain in a more playable way.
Fun and scientific is what we designed for, and our art designer have created beautiful anthropomorphic shapes for different strains and components. We are also trying to enrich the content of the card game in the case of simple and easy to understand, make it a game that everyone can play and love to play! Click here to see our rules of card games!
Figure 19. Cards We Made
For Stakeholders
Introduction
In EDU&COMM in Synthetic Biology, we have learned that it is better to have a main subject group when educational activities are carried out widely. Just like above, we finally chose high school and college students as our main subjects.
In this section, you can see how we chose the subjects of our education, why we changed our main subject, how we solved the problems we encountered, and what we perceived.
1. Survey
Our stakeholders can be mainly divided into six groups: scientific experts, government agricultural departments, companies, farmers, agricultural experts and the general public.
Farmers
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Farmers and farm managers have rich experience in pests and diseases, and their criteria for pesticide selection and purchase will become an important part of our own project measurement. Through them, we can also learn how the current daily operation of the rice industry is, so as to make our product design more practical. |
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Agricultural and forestry science and technology workers are responsible for agricultural scientific research and technical training, organization of agricultural scientific research projects and the selection and implementation of technology extension projects, and the dissemination of new agricultural technologies and new pesticides. By communicating with them, we can ask them to evaluate our project and get ideas and suggestions on how to promote the project. |
Agricultural Experts
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Companies
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Our stakeholders are mainly agricultural companies and biological companies. |
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In the process of advancing our project, we will often meet various difficulties and obstacles in the experimental process, so experimental experts are indispensable to us. Therefore, we need to keep long-term contact with experts in plant physiology, molecular biology, biotechnology and other fields, and timely consult the perplexity in experimental aspects to ensure the orderly progress of the experimental part of the project. |
Scientific Experts
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Government Agricultural Sector
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In agriculture, the government's policy is very important, and farmers' planting also follows the government's guidance. Government officials will organize the allocation of agricultural resources and the production of agricultural products. They will also supervise the quality of pesticides and fertilizers. Therefore, it is very necessary to communicate with the government departments, which can help us understand the relevant information and policies of agriculture, which is conducive to our project design and the actual implementation in the later stage. |
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In China, rice is closely related to the food, clothing and health of all people. So practically everyone who lives on rice is our stakeholder. We need to understand the preferences and perceptions of the consumers who buy rice, their requirements for the quality of rice, and the amount of money they are willing to pay for it, to help us establish standards for our projects. |
General Public
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Obviously, for scientific experts and agricultural experts, we learn more from them than we educate them.
For stakeholders like government agriculture departments, companies, farmers and the general public that are closely related to the implementation of future projects, government is not an appropriate part of our education. We can communicate with the government and get feedbacks, but from a practical point of view, the government agriculture departments are not suitable to be the main subject of our education.
In order to confirm whether it is necessary for us to conduct EDU what to conduct on the remaining three groups: companies, farmers and the general public, we conducted surveys on them.
1.1 Farmers
In Education for Stakeholders, we initially selected farmers as the main subject of Education among stakeholders due to the following two considerations:
- In the initial phase of our project, farmers were our primary target users.
- In order to effectively communicate with stakeholders and receive effective feedback from them, it is necessary to carry out a certain degree of knowledge popularization, so that they can understand the general design ideas of our project.
We asked farmland managers for their opinions, and they told us that their farmers lack knowledge about mycosis and suggested that we could conduct our EDU on rice mycosis with farmers, and thus introduce our project.
1.2 Agricultural Companies
The stakeholders of agricultural companies associated with our project can be broadly divided into two categories: biological companies that produce pesticides and grain companies that use pesticides. Grain companies that use pesticides are the obvious ones to educate. Therefore, we chose a well-known private rice company in Guangdong Province to investigate. We visited and interviewed them to learn about their prevention and treatment of rice sheath blight as well as the use of pesticides.
As a result, we found the following facts:
- The people in the company did not know the type of pesticide they were using and did not care about it.
- Paddy fields are tended by professional farmers. The criteria for choosing pesticides are low cost and high yield. They are very concerned about the value performance of pesticides.
- They don't care about and have no idea of the environmental problems caused by pesticides.
- Because of market demand and brand image, the company will produce a small portion of high-quality rice, such as organic rice without the use of pesticides.
- Pesticides are a big expense in farm management, and companies are concerned about new and popular pesticides.
1.3 General Public
Rice is the staple food of the Chinese people, and the general public are arguably the largest number of stakeholders. In order to understand people's preference for different treatments of rice, we investigated people's acceptance of biopesticides and their environmental awareness. This was mentioned in our previous Street Interview section.
2. Analysis
After thinking about it, we decided to formulate an activity to popularize the scientific knowledge for rice industry stakeholders that they really need, which was based on our integrated human practices research results.
For Farmers
We took advice from field managers and prepared to educate farmers about mycosis and related synthetic biology treatments.
For Grain Companies
- We decided to take the specific pesticides that companies use as examples to illustrate the differences between biological pesticides and chemical pesticides, and the possible environmental hazards they can cause.
- Because the company pays a certain amount of attention to the emerging pesticides, we decided to educate the company about the prospect of RNA pesticides in agriculture, as well as the application and advantages of the biocontrol bacterium Trichoderma atroviride in real life.
For General Public
In street interviews, we found a relative lack of knowledge about biochemical pesticides and the stigmatization of genetically modified crops in many people's minds. So correct educational guidance is needed.
3. Implementation
3.1 Farmers
Fail to Educate
We have prepared relevant contents for popular science, but in the process of popularizing science with farmers, we found that our preparation was useless. The reasons were as follows:
- Farmers are local residents, so their common language is the local dialect. Moreover, their Mandarin is not very good, which brings a barrier to our communication.
- During the communication, we found that although farmers may lack theoretical knowledge about fungal diseases, they have rich practical experience, so they do not need our popular science in this field.
- We still made attempts to educate the farmers in what we have prepared, but because of the low level of education of the farmers, the farmers did not understand what we were talking about.
In addition, we had a partial introduction to our project, but for the farmer, he did not care about the design process of the product, he only cared about the actual utility of the product and the price. In general, we have not achieved the educational goals we expected of farmers.
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Figure 20. Comunicate with Farmers
Find Another Approach
After we found it difficult to carry out the education of farmers, we did not give up the exploration of popularization for farmers. Farmers may not be suitable to be the main subject of our education, but farmers must be the end users of our project products. So we visited the local agricultural technology promotion center to illustrate the difficulties we encountered and ask them how they promote a new agricultural technology.
They shared with us possible solutions to these difficulties:
- Extending technology can start with younger farmers, who tend to be more receptive, better educated and speak good Madarin.
- Priority can be given to a young farmer to set up his field as a demonstration for technology promotion. When other farmers find out that the technology works really well, they will be eager to learn about it.
- When the number of farmers using the technology reaches a certain level, the farmers will promote the technology themselves, and eventually the relatively old farmers will also adopt the new technology.
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Figure 21. Visit the Local Agricultural Technology Promotion Center
3.2 Grain Company
Because of the pandemic, we were not able to pay a return visit to the grain company. Thus, we chose the means of online meeting to dwell upon the types of pesticides they use, their advantages and disadvantages, as well as the potential impact on the environment. At the same time, we also popularize the prospect of RNA pesticide in agriculture, and the application and advantages of biocontrol bacterium Trichoderma atroviride in real life.
Grain companies are more interested in Biocontrol bacterium and more skeptical about RNA pesticides.
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Figure 22. Meeting With Grain Company
3.3 General Public
As the largest group of stakeholders, we have carried out extensive popular science activities, which are naturally more diverse in content and form. We have incorporated the popular science of biochemical pesticides and genetically modified genes as well as the knowledge related to synthetic biology in our project into Against Prejudice and In Synthetic Biology section. In other words, the essence of these two sections is our exploration of popular science for the general public as the stakeholders.
Activities highly related to the project include Street Interview, Supplementary Education during Street Interview, High School Student Pesticide Popular Science Lecture, Extended Courses. You can click on them to review the activities.
One thing to add is that we have held special lectures on RNA in collaboration with NJU-China. In these lectures, NJU-China focused on RNAi technology and its application in medicine, while we focused on RNA pesticides. After popularizing science, we investigated the methods of rice pest control for 50 students who participated in the special lecture. Among them, 52 percent would prefer biochemical pesticides, 16 percent would choose genetically modified rice, and 32 percent would choose RNA pesticides. Again, this is different from the data we collected before.
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Figure 23. A Part of our Popular Science Activities
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Figure 24. Results Comparison
4. Reflection
We can get the following perceptions from the Education and Communication of Farmers and Grain Company:
- If you want to effectively educate your stakeholders, you must try to understand their positions and identities, and find ways to make your content relevant to their concerns.
- Due to some limitations, farmers in China should not be the subject of communication and education on a small time scale. And most of them are managed by the government or enterprises. Therefore, it is better to choose the enterprises or government that manage them as the main objects, and then carry out follow-up science popularization activities accordingly.
For the education of the general public, we can find that the results of the three surveys we have done are different in the choice of pest and disease resistance in rice.
The different results may be due to the different emphasis of science popularization on the subjects after we investigated them. For example, in the Street Interview, we focused on popularizing the differences and advantages and disadvantages of biochemical pesticides. In the High School Student Pesticide Popular Science Lecture, we emphasized that genetically modified rice was not allowed to be sold. In the Special Lecture on RNA, we emphasized the remaining doubts about the safety of RNA pesticides. These will all affect their choices after the presentation.
We can see that effective science popularization has a certain guiding nature, and public science popularization needs to be treated seriously and carried out pertinently.
Conlusion
In our journey of EDU&COMM, we gradually understand why we need to popularize synthetic biology and why we need to involve more people participate in it to understand synthetic biology -- because it is closely related to our project and human beings, and we are popularizing science to let the public know and understand our ideas. With the development of the times, people's ideas will constantly change, and science popularization can help our project better implemented in the future world.
Perhaps what we have done so far won't completely change people's minds about the ideas we put forward in our project, and it will still be controversial. But that should not be a reason for us to stop popularizing synthetic biology. As we learned in the Technology Promotion Center, we need to take the first step, and then "Let the bullet fly for a while" and "wait for the wind". We believe that with the rapid development of synthetic biology, the efforts of all iGEMers together will not be in vain.
Figure 25. Our Journey of EDU&COMM