Background
Reproduction has been an important activity of human life since ancient times, and women are the most important force in this link. Nowadays, more and more family would like to prefer to breastfeed their children since the breast milk has more nutritive value. Undoubtedly, breast milk is the best natural food for babies. The children who are breastfed are more resistant than others who do not been fed by breast milk.
Beside of this, the process of breastfeeding can enhance the bond between the child and the mother. It is an activity that enhancing emotional mother-child relationship.
Why We Are Doing This
Breastfeeding is an enjoying while suffering process for a mother. China now has a two-child policy, some of our group members have younger sister or brother. Some of them recall the process during the suckling period of their mother, it is not always pleasurable.
Besides, in order to define our project, we designed a questionnaire and spread it to the society. According to the results that we’ve received, majority of parents face a lot of problems and have variety of concerns during the feeding period, the most prominent problems are:
1)Problem of breast feeding itself: breast distending pain, breast milk deficiency, breast milk deposition and mastitis.
2)Problem related to breast feeding: feeding time is irregular, feeding place is limited, and storage method is not standardized.
Because of this common problem, we are considering that whether we can create an artificial breast milk to help them to ease the problem.
Investigation
Because of this common problem, we are considering that whether we can create an artificial breast milk to help them to ease the problem. By communicating with pregnant women and novice mothers, they all show great interest towards our project, but we also note their concerns about artificial breast milk: Is the nutritional value comparable to breast milk? Is artificial breast milk easy to preserve? And so on. Based on this, our team realized that the most important value of artificial breast milk is to remain its nutritive value of nature breast milk as much as possible. So we focused on safely producing clean human breast milk by inducing yeast to express homo species genes. We also interviewed with an expert of diary production of China Agriculture University, she indicated that milk production has more better way for storing and we arranged new experiment.
In order to know more about the diary market, we interviewed the CEO of the TurtleTree(name of an artificial milk company), they gave us strong support and told us maybe we could strike the global diary market by our innovative idea.