Simple Human Practices
In order to explore the social significance of our project, we have distributed a questionnaire on "Public Views on Intestinal Gas and Intestinal Ostomy" on social platforms such as WeChat and QQ. We received a total of 324 valid answers. After analyzing and discussing the data, we have a more general and in-depth understanding of the public's views on this project, which is of great help for us to make better project results.
This questionnaire mainly reflects the views of people aged 0-20 and 30-50. More than 83% of them think that farting will bring troubles, embarrassment and other problems; and no matter what the occasion, some people will feel embarrassed. This reflects the public's need to improve this situation, which reflects the actual life benefits of our team's project.
In the survey, about 76% of the respondents had not heard of intestinal ostomy, and some of the respondents still had some concerns about biosafety about this method, and most people did not choose biopharmaceuticals for fart control. Therefore, we should increase the popularization of scientific knowledge of enterostomy and biosafety to the public; at the same time, improve our products to ensure biosafety.
Regarding biopharmaceuticals, only about 9% of people think that biopharmaceuticals are meaningless to temporarily eliminate peculiar smells. Most people are willing to buy them and prefer oral capsules. In the questionnaire, the respondents' concerns mainly focus on price, side effects, and the perception that ordinary people temporarily eliminate fart taste is of little significance. This also enlightens our future research direction, which is to reduce costs as much as possible and reduce the side effects of capsules.
Integrated Human Practices
Participation in CCiC academic conference
Our team participated in the online 2020 7th Synthetic Biology Conference of China iGEMer Community --- From Lab to Fab (CCiC). During the conference, we listened to the lectures delivered by the leaders in the field of synthetic biology who shared the insights in some of the most cutting-edge technologies in this field. We also communicated with other Chinese iGEM teams.
We also presented our project to the conference and gained valuable advice from peers and professors. They shared insights on how we could adjust the algorithm of our modeling, why we should interview the doctors instead of directly interviewing the patients for the sake of protections for those patients, and how we could make our academic poster better the next time.
Interview With Doctor
We interviewed Hao Wu, an expert in enterostomy from The Twelfth People's Hospital of Guangzhou City, to ask for his opinions on the issues facing by patients who received enterostomy and his suggestions on our project.
Firstly, he pointed out that the purpose of enterostomy is not to improve the quality of their lives, but to survive. He believed this surgery had brought inconvenience to patients' daily lives. For instance, the intestinal liquid could be controlled using modern technologies, but there was no effective method to prevent foul gases from escaping into the air from their stoma. In this way, the smelly odor around them usually brought them social embarrassment when they were in public places. This became a great problem for them especially those patients were constantly facing traditional bias in China, as people often treated them like the disabled, and they needed constant care from doctors and nurses. This proved our project had the potential to significantly improve those patients' quality of life.
As for the price, 100 yuans (around 15 dollars) per day or lower would be acceptable for most of the patients. "I have seen a patient who spent thousands of yuans on perfumes to cover the unpleasant odor" he said. Therefore, in our future research direction, we will research on the most economic way to produce the product with the cost around 100 yuans (around 15 dollars) per day.
Interview with the CEO of biotech company "Xbiome"
Xbiome is the first AI pharmaceutical company in China that specializes in intestinal micro-ecology. Currently, its main research field is Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT). The company devoted itself to the treatment of intestinal and extra-intestinal diseases, by developing or reconstructing the intestinal flora of patients, using the method of FMT.
FMT has proved that flora directly interacts with some intestinal diseases, and it has also shown effect in reducing the symptoms of some refractory diseases, like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), colon inflammation, mental disease, obesity, insulin resistance, and autoimmune diseases, which have become research focuses in recent years. The use of FMT can be divided into two levels: conventional treatments of diseases identified by medical guidelines (rCDI); exploratory studies of diseases that are not included in the medical guidelines (i.e. bacteria-related diseases). More than 100,000 patients have been treated with FMT by now.
Through the interview, they first took us to visit their research and development department, introducing their major researching area to us. They introduced some machines and instruments that might help our experiment part. For example, they introduced a machine called Flow Cytometer (FCM) that can calculate the percentage of living bacteria. We also learned how to use machine to simulate intestinal environment. This enabled us to test whether our product can work in real intestine. In early stage of our project, we had assumed to make our final product into the form of food instead of pills, so we asked for their advice. Fortunately, they had experience about it. They suggested that making food with treating effect is feasible, and is more likely to be accepted by the public, unless the bacteria do not interact with the food.
For HP part, they also offered us some valuable advice. We express our interest in publishing our final product into the market, so they told us the flow from pharmaceutical research to marketing, including some laws and regulation about pharmacy in China. They also suggested we can propagandize our product as well as knowledge on intestinal health, in order to expand our potential market. Additionally, they advised that we had better communicate more with doctors and patients, in order to know the demand for our product. If necessary, we can ask a consulting firm to estimate some data to calculate the demand for the whole market.
Public Education
We publicized our project to both low-aged children, high school students and general public through several activities.
For Kids Aged 7-13 - Exhibition
For kids aged 7 to 13, we held an exhibition for a full day in Shenzhen Youth Activity Center in order to convey the knowledge of intestinal tract covered in our project to more children. We used the same area for exhibition with the iGEM team from Peking University. Through this cooperation, we exchanged experience of publicity and gained many valuable information. We also gave them meaningful insights on how to attract kids of younger ages.
During the process of our exhibition, we held two lectures on the theme "The Formation of Farts" at 2p.m. and 4p.m. res; the speakers of these two lectures were William and Shea. Since the audience of our lectures were children younger than 12 years old, we designed a lot of Q&A and other interactive sessions through these lectures so that children could understand this knowledge more easily. During the lectures well guided by William and Shea, we received active responses from the audience. We believed that after these two interesting popular science lectures, many children would have a deeper understanding of intestinal knowledge.
Through the whole exhibition, we kept holding a game for children in the Activity Center. We provided pigments with different colors and large papers for children to draw only by hands but not pens. When children drew, our team members kept guiding them by asking some questions about the intestinal knowledge, so children could draw the pathway on how E. Coli produces ammonia. Therefore, at the last of our exhibition, with our members' leading, there were two colorful drawing boards created by children showing their understanding of intestine and fart.
For teenagers aged 15 to 18 - High School Activity
For teenagers aged 15 to 18, our team also cooperated with our school (International Department, the Affiliated High School of South China Normal University) 's biology club (known as Lillian Biology Kingdom) to promote our project on campus. The objects of this promotion were mainly high school students, and several middle school students also attended the Club Fair. In order to let more high school students learn about synthetic biology, our team made a roll up banner introducing the project of our group. Many students were interested in our project and asked about the principles and effects of it.
In addition to the publicity on the Club Fair, our team also delivered our questionnaires to students on campus. In this way, we not only collected data of students' opinions and suggestions but also informed more people of our project. In the questionnaire, our group included knowledge on enterostomy so that more high school students could understand the difficulties patients who had taken enterostomy confronted every day. Therefore, the social significance of our project is better understood by more high school students.
For General Public - Media Publicity
Since March of 2019, our team has been publishing articles through Wechat's Official account. The purpose was to publicize our project and the principles lying behind the project design. In the early period of our project, in order to provide the chance for more people to learn about synthetic biology and genetic engineering, we introduced several successful and meaningful iGEM projects in recent years, including the projects of UCSD 2018, NTHU Formosa 2018, and SJTU-BioX-Shanghai 2018.
Later, we published the description of our project. In the article, we introduced the social needs of our project, which were relieving the embarrassment of farting in public places and reducing social embarrassment of patients who had received enterostony operation. Also, we briefly introduced three main parts of the genetic engineering pathways in out projects in the article.
After introducing our projects, we posted the results of our human practices, including the survey results, the promotion video, and so forth.
There are totally more than 2800 clicks for our articles. Our highest-viewed article is the article that introduces our project, which received almost 800 views. The number of people who follow our official account is constantly growing and reached around 150 till October 19th.
We also posted our promotion video on Bilibili, the largest video platform for youth in China. Our video received 1600+ views.
