Darcy Lefroy, UWA student | Farm Weekly - video Dailymotion

UWA student Darcy Lefroy discusses the human factors affecting the adoption and diffusion of emerging biotechnologies.

Transcript

00:00I'm Darcy, I'm doing my PhD with UWA and the CSIRO. I'm looking at the adoption and diffusion of novel

00:05biotechnologies in agriculture and related areas. So there are a lot of significant technological

00:11challenges in creating novel biotechnologies like mRNA vaccines, plastic degrading enzymes,

00:16and carbon capturing microbes. But when they're ready, which they're not quite yet,

00:22the world that they're being released into is kind of an unknown whether or not people

00:25want to use them, the practical limitations on how affordable they are, whether the public will

00:30accept them or not. And these have huge implications for ultimately whether or not they're used,

00:35which is almost as important as solving the raw scientific challenges of creating them.

00:40And that's my research, understanding the human factors outside the laboratory

00:45which influence the adoption and diffusion of these biotechnologies.