Team:OUC-China/Human Practices
Overview
Our project was inspired by biocomputer, aiming at constructing logic gates with RNA switches and making them basic elements of future biocomputers. Biocomputer is yet to be mature research, and there are still many aspects we are not clear about. In order to make our project responsible and good for society, our team tried to apply human practice into every step of project implementation. Not only did we thoroughly consider our project’s influence on the world, but we also talked to the public, stakeholders, and experts through interviews, and reflected the results and suggestions on our project.
Background Research
Our project is involved in information processing, therefore, the first thing we wanted to learn about was how much attention did the public pay to information processing? Therefore, we made a simple questionnaire and passed them to the public through social media. We specially sent our questionnaire to iGEM teams online, since iGEMers’ concern is relevant to their research field and source of inspiration. In addition to the public concerns, we surveyed what kinds of problems are synthetic biology able to solve according to iGEMers’ and the public’s views.
We received 311 effective replies from the public, and 32 from the iGEMers. Among the participants in the public group, there was a wide range of majors and professions involved, which indicates that our survey was quite widespread and representative of different communities apart from iGEM teams.
Figure 1. The career of participants.
(A) The percentage of general career types among participants. (B) A more detailed classification of job types among the in-service staff. (C) The majors of students, who are mostly university students.
① What is your most concerning problem in daily life?
Figure 2. Concerns of the public and iGEM teams.
All respondents are allowed to pick up to 3 options. For iGEMers, the first three most concerned problems are Healthcare, Environmental protection, and Information processing. For the public, the first three most concerned problems are Healthcare, Food security, and Environmental protection.
First, we can tell that Healthcare ranked top in both groups of respondents, which is probably related to the coronavirus epidemic this winter. Also, Information Processing related issues were more concerned with iGEMers than the public.
② How much do you know about synthetic biology?
Figure 3. The participants’ knowledge of synthetic biology.
According to the results, it’s clear that the public knows less about synthetic biology. Those who chose ‘Basically know’ and ‘know very well’ only account for 14.15%. So, we believe that it’s meaningful to spread synthetic biology to the public. We continued to publish the scientific comics E. coli Spaceship, and spread simple synthetic biology knowledge. You can check more about our comics on the Education page.
③ What problems do you think synthetic biology is able to solve?
Figure 4. The problems that can be solved by synthetic biology.
Respondents can choose what they agree without limitation of option numbers.
We can see that the percentage of iGEMers’ chosen options is higher than the public in every option except ‘others’ and ‘uselessness’. Especially, there were participants in the public group who consider synthetic biology as useless, which further testify that the public didn’t know much about it.
Despite that, there was no option limitation for this question, and participants can choose whatever they agreed with, even for iGEMers, only 40.63% of them thought that synthetic biology is capable of solving information processing problems. We are a bit surprised because we thought iGEMers were supposed to choose all the options. Maybe this indicated the applying synthetic biology to information processing is kind of a ‘blind spot’ in people’s awareness, although there have already been many cases of them. Hope that our project can be interesting enough for people to get to learn about its development in this aspect.
Primary Interview Of Stake Holders
Since biocomputer is a new concept developed upon the basis of electronic computer theory, we believed that its influence on the electronic computer industry is an aspect that we can’t avoid discussing. And only after learning about the current situation of electronic computers, can we consider biocomputer’s potential influence in a considerate manner.
We hope to learn about the current development of the computer industry from the stakeholders, in our case, the stakeholders are those who work in this industry and those who are studying computer science. The interviewees we found were from a wide variety of careers, which included software design, background development, big data research and analysis, program development, etc. From another perspective, the time they get involved with the computer industry varied from 2 to 34 years. Therefore, our interview can help us learn about the real and comprehensive circumstances of the computer industry.
In order to avoid misleading the interviewees, instead of using questionnaires, we took the interviews mostly from social media in person. Before the interviews, we had explained to them about the contents of this following interview, how will the results be used, and asked for their permission. We have made all interviewees anonymous and tried our best to make sure that all questions asked were neutral and had open-ended answers.
We asked if our interviewees could briefly comment on the current circumstances and applications of computers. And here are part of their responses:
‘Computers can be used in all kinds of ways. The computing functions of computers are powerful and they can replace the human to do a lot of work, for example, artificial intelligence is an extension of the computer. The computer changes a lot, there are also many directions which have the potential to make a development. It should be able to cover all aspects of people and applied to all parts of human life.’
‘The development of computers focuses on the application, mainly on solving practical problems. Currently, the computer is the hottest field, it may replace human beings in many aspects in the future.
‘Computers are developing rapidly. From the earliest personal office work in written form to the use of computer network to assist management, and now the existence of artificial intelligence, interpersonal cooperation, new computer language, technology development; In addition, the computer also provides services for each family, such as network, access control system, security monitoring. Now, the computer has gradually penetrated into everyone's life, it will also have an impact on future social development, from a former high-tech into a technology of daily life.’
According to the answers we get from the interviews, overall, interviewees are quite approving of computer’s development today, and computer science is undergoing continuous progress. As what we experienced in daily life, the computer’s connection with life will become closer.
Interviewing The Experts
After the initial designs and interviews, we still had some doubts about our project. Our initial design was to construct logic gates and applied them to calculations. Since the electronic computer is so well-developed according to our previous interviews, it seemed unlikely that the biocomputer element we research into will easily surpass the calculation speed of electronic computers. With our concerns, we carried on further interviews with the professors of our school. Apart from our concerns about the value of our project, we also hoped professors would evaluate our project and give us some opinions on how to improve it.
We first sought help from professors in Computer Science and Technology from the College of Information Science and Engineering. It turned out that professors from the College of Information Science and Engineering were not familiar with the idea of applying biological logic gates on building computers, however, they did offer some opinions about the relationship between biocomputers and electronic computers.
Professor Lin Qi said, ‘Nowadays it takes a lot of energy for electronic computers to conduct high-performance calculations, and they are demanding of the temperature and humidity. And that’s why there are scientists researching biocomputers and quantum computers. Electronic computers were developed for the purpose of replacing human beings, who are living creatures, to conduct calculations. On the contrary, biocomputers now offer a new perspective of using living creatures to study computing problems. As long as its calculating efficiency can be evaluated, biocomputer can provide some possibilities for future calculation methods.’
Professor Haipeng Qu mentioned, ’Biocomputer is sure to be applied to specific calculations, which means it will be applied for special functions in special occasions. It can form a complementary relationship with electronic computers.’
So, from professors’ responses, we concluded that maybe our project is not so practical at present, but it does have scientific values and can serve as a complementary role to electronic computers in the future.
Also, the professors gave us some valuable opinions on how to improve our project.
Professor Bo Qin suggested us emphasize the stability of our designs, because stability means a lot for the function of a computer. As far as the present development of biocomputer is concerned, we need to make sure that our test results can be stable enough in a certain period of time. Therefore, we further added stability designs, including improving toehold and 3WJ switches, as well as adding hairpin structures at the 5’ end of trigger RNAs.
What’s more, professor Haipeng Qu commented that, although we have achieved some logical elements, we haven’t solved the difficult part yet, which is to further assemble these structures. He was right, the single-input or two-input logic gates we designed can’t fully simulate the CPU of electronic computers. Under his suggestion, we tried to design cascades and multiple-input logic gates for a further step.
In order to learn more about the concept and characteristics of biocomputers, we established contact with professor Xiaolong Wang, who used to research biocomputers.
Figure 5. We interviewed professor Wang in his office
He believed that, in a broad sense, a living creature itself can be already called a biocomputer, because the interactions that happen within organisms consist of inputs and outputs with logical relationships and strict controls. He talked about the previous research focus was once on the cell-free systems, but now more researchers aim at taking advantages of living cells to build biocomputers. And biocomputers’ functions should emphasize biological characteristics, like detecting cancers or pollutions. Using logic gates to realize the versatility of computers is still faced with a lot of difficulties.
Professor Xiaolong Wang’s idea echoed with our previous interviews: biocomputer should have special functions and would be complementary with electronic computers eventually. The expertise we obtained has inspired us to consider realizing biological functions with our biocomputer designs. Finally, in the discussion with other iGEM teams in meet-ups, we settled that our logic gate designs can be applied to detecting viruses. (To see more details, please read our collaboration page).
Callback With The Stakeholders
After interviewing the experts, our horizons have been broadened, and the calculation function of biocomputer is not the only thing we are taking into account. For this part, we would like the stakeholders to imagine combining computer and biology. People were quite interested in it, and put forward many visions:
"BCI enables the communication between the human brain and the human brain through information transmission. In the future, people can get their own ideas without speaking, eye contacts, or expressions."
"It would be interesting to see an anti-biologically-assembled nanobot that could lead to targeted therapies, such as drug delivery, rather than indiscriminate attacks on various cells. I've heard that there's been some development, and I hope it will become more mature in the future and actually be used in clinical treatment."
"I heard that silicon resource isn't going to be able to handle the explosive growth of information storage in the future, and that's going to be a serious problem, which means we're going to have to change carriers of information. Perhaps the developing biological information detection and storage, using biology to realize the function of computers, can help solve this potential problem."
"The computer helps a lot with detection. Take the COVID-19 as an example. It used to take a long time from discovery to detection. Now, with the continuous improvement of the database and the use of big data comparison by computer, it will soon discover new virus features. Computational biology should have a lot to offer biology.”
"Human nanobots can help with medical care by directing drugs to the source of the disease. There should be a good future for the combination of biology in this field, and there is a large room for development. The current research in this field is not as profound that in other fields, and the development potential is relatively large."
People generally recognized that the cross of these two fields can solve more problems in real life. One idea that mentioned about ‘using biology to realize the function of computers' caught our eyes. We’re glad to see that biocomputer's potential function fits people’s expectations on it, which confirmed the advantage of developing biocomputers.
Also, they have put forwarded many expectations that we are not capable of adapting them to our project. But many of which are already subjects of iGEM teams and other researchers, like targeted therapies. We believed that these visions are sure to be solved one day in the future by the combining efforts of everyone involved with science.