Public engagement

Our report "Public attitudes to life sciences research in six European countries" shows that interest in life sciences research is generally high among citizens and that the three most accepted purposes of using genome editing are related to the medical field. 6000 persons were interviewed in this pan-European study which was led by the ORION partners VA in Sweden and CEITEC in the Czech Republic.

On Thursday 11 March the ORION partners hosted an online event to share the findings of ORION public dialogues on genome editing with relevant stakeholders in the research community. The findings are detailed in the corresponding reports of each of the countries where the dialogues were conducted during 2019-2020: the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Czech Republic. The objective of the dialogues was to explore public attitudes towards the use of genome editing technology in fundamental life sciences research in order to inform research organisations when and how to engage the public with emerging technologies.

Welcome to the online launch event of the findings of the ORION public dialogue on genome editing on 11 March at 14:00-16:00 CET. The public dialogues which were conducted in the Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden and the UK during 2019/2020 sought to explore public attitudes to fundamental life sciences research when revolutionary genome editing technologies are used in order to understand when and how to engage audiences with emerging technologies. The dialogue also sought to understand how public engagement strategies might differ between countries.

At the beginning of November 2019, the Berlin Science Week connected science communities with the general public. Luiza Bengtsson and Emma Harris from the ORION Training team at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) held an Open Science workshop and discussed "Why everyone should care about open science".