Team:UZurich/Collaborations
Collaboration
To learn as much about the status quo in agriculture as possible and hence understand whether a membrane vesicle based solution like ours could work in an international context, we entered two collaborations, albeit with the same general goal.
The first one was with NUS from Singapore and MIT from Manipal in India, and the second collaboration was with the iGEM EPFL team from Lausanne, Switzerland.
Our goal was to understand the current challenges for farmers, what scientists have to say on the matter as well as talking to distributors. Further, we wanted to understand if consumers know what GMOs are, and perhaps even more importantly, comprehend how they perceive them - and that on an intercontinental level.
Our first collaboration with the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Manipal
Institute of Technology (MIT) started with a Zoom call.
We brainstormed and soon agreed that we all had a common point - finding an alternative to currently used synthetic pesticides - but had different solutions towards solving the issue. Hence we saw a learning opportunity, not in the technical side of our projects, but in going out and talking directly to scientists, distributors, farmers, and consumers.
In order to keep aligned with our collaboration goals and to ensure that we met deadlines, we held regular Zoom calls.
About 10 weeks after our first Zoom call, we consolidated our survey insights, and made a video
where we discussed our findings. We made it available on
youtube for everybody to have the opportunity to learn from our insights.
Here are some of the learnings we took from our collaboration on the use and perception of GMOs and pesticides:
From scientists across all three countries, we learned that purification and safety standards have to be maintained and considered, which in turn makes it difficult to keep the costs of production low. Also, we learned from them that the current bioreactor scalability is low. One way to reduce costs in research might be to privatize a part of it, as this would automatically incentivize keeping the costs low. At the same time, this brings up questions of the patentability of organisms - an issue that will surely need further discussions.
Next, we found that one of the main factors pushing up the price of agricultural goods in India are the middlemen. Hence, it is not necessarily the efficiency of farming that needs to go up, but rather the efficiency of getting the produced goods from the farms to the consumers. Nevertheless, insights from Switzerland and Singapore showed that quite often, the reason for farmers not to move towards organic farming are the associated extra costs. Fully organic farming is usually more expensive than more conventional, synthetic pesticide aided agriculture. With more support from outside though, some of the farmers stated that they might be open to switch towards organic farming, and that they believed that this would be the right way moving forward.
As one farmer in Switzerland put it in an
interview with us
: “If I didn’t have to use them [synthetic pesticides], I wouldn’t, that's logical.” [1]
Finally, we spoke to consumers and saw an interesting trend: Although most of them acknowledged that GMOs had a lot of potential in helping to reach a sustainable future in agriculture, and that most of them were not necessarily against the use of GMOs to do so, the consumers usually had certain doubts about GMOs.
These included doubts about unknown risks, about how GMOs would be used, and about the exact science behind them. This finding incentivised us to push towards a better education on the subject in other parts of our iGEM UZH project.
For our second collaboration, we collaborated with the iGEM EPFL team. We came to the conclusion that both teams again had an interest in learning how consumers and farmers stand towards the use of GMOs and pesticides.
This collaboration helped us in gaining more insights across the broad cultural and linguistic diversity of Switzerland. In order to attain these insights, we diversified our approach towards this collaboration. Our team, iGEM UZH, used the same qualitative approach aimed at farmers as with our previous collaboration, while the EPFL team focused on quantifying the public’s opinion of GMOs. While both tasks were split, they were imagined and designed during weekly video calls to ensure satisfaction for both teams. Our findings and related insights can be found in the pdf above.
EPFL's survey, in which 129 individuals participated, aimed at quantifying the public perception of GMOs. However, one must keep in mind that the survey was not randomly distributed. Most people answering were young and were in some type of higher education program. This is not necessarily detrimental to the findings (as most university students do not specialize in fields such as genetics or synthetic biology), but hence means that it is not possible to comment on the validity of this survey. Thus, this survey should not be used to generalize the results to a wider population.
Nevertheless, while data analysis unfortunately did not yield statistically significant results, we saw a continuation of the trends that we could recognise from the collaboration with NUS and MIT. Here are some results from the collaboration with EPFL [2]:
Fig 1: Statement 3/9, “I am wary of GMOs”, on a scale of 1-10
Fig 2: Statement 8/9, “I am wary of pesticides”, on a scale of 1-10
Consumers generally agreed that GMOs have a lot of potential, but that they show too much distrust towards them to agree to their usage. The same cannot be said for pesticides. Consumers indicated their increasing scepticism towards synthetic pesticides, and mostly agreed that they are most likely not a long term solution if we want to reach a sustainable future in agriculture. Surprisingly, we found that consumers preferred GMOs over pesticides if a decision had to be made between the two.
Fig 3: “To ensure the protection of a plant in agriculture, I prefer a GMO solution (modified plants for example) to using pesticides.”, on a scale of 1-10
A very interesting point that we wish we had more data on is the public’s opinion on GMOs, using age as an explanatory variable. Unfortunately, we lacked data in the 35-44, 65-74, and 75+ age groups. Further, with the given time frame set by the iGEM competition, we were not able to repeat this survey and distribute it appropriately to a broader demographic.
To summarize, we found that there is still a great distrust towards GMOs, which we hypothesize to be due to lack of information and education on the topic, but that people are starting to learn about the benefits of their application. We can also identify an increasing trend in distrust towards synthetic pesticides. Even though our iGEM project has concluded, we will certainly closely follow the development of public opinion in this field in years to come.
[1] Beetles, Borders and Bacteria: An Interview with Rudy Studer by iGEM UZH 2021, 12. October 2021
[2] Sources from the collaboration UZH-EPFL