3. Scientific outputs and collaboration
The Consortium has strongly welcomed the decision of the Steering Committee that results should be peer-reviewed by scientific journals. A letter from the Consortium has been published by Nature that outlines the trials, and other papers on the methodology are in draft or are being planned. We have been in positive discussions with the editor of a major Journal for publishing the main results of the project in a special issue.
Members of staff are also involved in the BRIGHT project, and contacts are being established with large scale GM crop studies overseas. NIAB have also been conducting studies of gene flow of the farm-scale evaluation sites with our full co-operation.
4. Consortium management
Most of the key staff required for the project are now in place. The major roles are:
Project co-ordinator — the primary point of contact with the Steering Committee and DETR, responsible for the integration of the study
Project administrator — responsible for maintaining the developing documentation of the project
Crop managers — the scientists responsible for each of the contracts — one per crop
Crop co-ordinators — scientists dedicated to the project, responsible for its day-to-day conduct, especially of the field work, and for the delivery of validated data sets to the data managers, and for undertaking many of the analyses; again, one per crop
Data managers - responsible for the integrity of the data and for guidance on overall quality assurance within the project
Statisticians — responsible for experimental design and for supervising the eventual analyses
Protocol leaders — responsible for the quality of the protocols and to assist in the interpretation of the results
Surveyors, survey managers — responsible for data collection
5. Health, safety and security
All staff are bound to the health and safety policies of their employers. In addition, all protocols address safety issues to guide risk assessments. In general, there are no risks over above those typically encountered on agri-environmental research on lowland farms. There remains a potential security issue for our staff, but no problems have been encountered so far.
6. Public Perception of the Project
This research programme has become one of the most controversial ever conducted in the UK. We have frequently, willingly and openly been involved in local meetings and worked with the media. However, over the summer, the scientific issues behind the research has been obscured by misinformed and disproportionately heavy media coverage of the risks associated with the trials. The point has now been reached where public understanding of the project has been compromised.
We take part in frequent interviews and briefings that do not lead to published statements about the scientific issues. We are concerned that we have little chance to defend attacks on the integrity and quality of our science. We were particular disappointed about statements made by Greenpeace claiming that the science was flawed, only days after an open seminar in London at which we presented the science case. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were amongst a packed audience that day and neither voiced any defects in project design or methodology.
These farm scale evaluations have had the result of raising issues that go well beyond the environmental safety of GM crops. Such issues concern food safety, countryside quality and the relationships between consumers, corporations and Government. We strongly wish to be pro-active and positive about our work within this public debate, but this is difficult given that our priority must be to remain firmly focussed on the conduct of the experiment itself. We are concerned that we have been given inadequate resources to present the science behind the trials at the level that the public expects, especially at the local scale for the large number of sites to be used next year.
7. Acknowledgements
We are hugely grateful to the farmers involved in the study, for all of the time and effort that have contributed, both to the management of the crops, and to the dialogue with both pressure groups and members of the general public. We also much appreciate the work of Paul Rylott and Judith Jordan from AgrEvo in finding the maize and rape sites.
8. Major outputs to date
Firbank, L.G., Dewar, A.M., Hill, M.O., May, M.J., Perry, J.N., Rothery, P., Squire, G. & Woiwod, I.P. (1999). Farm scale evaluation of GM crops explained. Nature, 399, 727-728.
Published 23 December 1999
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