Ricerc@Sapienza

The new life sciences and biotechnologies have challenged our classical understanding of being human, on an individual and private level as well as on a being in society. While new rearrangement of the nature/culture borders, and the advent of new biotechnologies, appealed to a deep rethinking of society and the world. Therefore, educational experts and policy-makers have engaged themselves in the development of new ways to make research and innovation processes accessible to every citizen. The main goal of our project is the promotion of a new idea of "scientific citizenship" for our society, in other words, to offer to citizens adequate educational, cognitive and critical tools to orient themselves through the several streams of knowledge related to LSB that they encounters in everyday life. In this context we focus on infertility perception by young people, because, according to World Health Organization (WHO), the infertility affects 15-20% of couples in industrialized countries, and the causes are multifactorial, which means that the problem can depend on both genetic and environmentals genetic factors. Considering the complex nature of this issue, our project is aimed to highlight the contents and, above all, the strategies of societal engagement that can be developed in order to answer to the new challenges of 21st century knowledge society, both in an academic environment (internal communication of science) and in the wider, more complex social dimension (science outreach, formal and informal education). As support in these strategies we choose the ICTs because of its availability, anonymity and low access cost are an increasingly common way for young people to find information on sensitive issues. The findings also reveal that chat and email services may represent alternative channels, for public institutions, to address the health care needs of young people and tools to create a link between young people and health care experts.