GRAND PRIZE WINNER! Stronger plants, stronger science, and stronger communication.
Biofortified is an independent group blog for plant genetics and genetic engineering (GE). By posting news, discussing research, debunking myths, and inviting the input of guest experts and especially readers, our knowledgeable writers are helping to bring a new standard of communication to agricultural biotechnology. Check us out!
About You
Section 1: About You
First Name
Karl
Last Name
Haro von Mogel
Organization
Biofortified.org
Country
United States
Section 2: About Your Organization
Organization Name
Biofortified.org
Organization Website
Organization Phone
Organization Address
Organization Country
United States
Your idea
Name Your Project
GRAND PRIZE WINNER! Stronger plants, stronger science, and stronger communication.
Country your work focuses on
United States
What makes your approach innovative?
Biofortified is a group science blog that focuses on genetic engineering and related subjects in agriculture and plant biology. Posts are currently written by two graduate students and two professors, with feature posts written by guest experts. The blog format gives interested consumers an opportunity to learn about genetic engineering, ask questions, and contribute to the discussion. Discussion is two-way, allowing all sides to learn about each other’s concerns. Anyone can start a discussion in our newly added forum. To our knowledge, no other organization is making such a dedicated effort to discussing genetic engineering on the web.
Our blog mascot, Frank N. Foode, helps to make genetic engineering easier to explain and understand. As he travels the country and the world in search of plant genetics adventures, he gives us a personal connection to the genetics of the foods we eat. In the near future, we plan to release the first in a series of videos starring Frank. Most people have all the basic tools to learn more about their food right at home, and with Frank N. Foode as their guide, they will see that science can be fun and delicious!
Describe Your Idea
Biofortified is an independent group blog for plant genetics and genetic engineering (GE). By posting news, discussing research, debunking myths, and inviting the input of guest experts and especially readers, our knowledgeable writers are helping to bring a new standard of communication to agricultural biotechnology. Check us out!
How will you sustain your solution?
To keep this project going, we will recruit additional contributors to Biofortified. Some scientists will participate by submitting posts, videos, or podcasts directly to Biofortified, while others that have their own blogs can have their genetic engineering related posts automatically cross-posted to the group blog. Contributors will be able to identify their membership in Biofortified with a special badge on their websites that link back to Biofortified, indicating to visitors that they are willing to engage in discussion about genetic engineering. We are also hoping to attract more guest experts, including critics of genetic engineering such as Michael Pollan, to get the conversation going and attract readers.
Biofortified is not even a year old, yet it already has over 2,000 unique visitors per month. It is important to keep people interested, to create a community where people feel that they can be open and honest, and to make the site entertaining enough to keep people coming back. Maintaining the site is fairly inexpensive, but we would also like to offer small monthly prizes to readers such as t-shirts or books to encourage them to engage in conversation.
What will be the impact of your solution?
Of the founding contributors to Biofortified, three live in the United
States and one in Australia. As more contributors across the world are
added to Biofortified, we will be better able to add to the global
conversation on genetic engineering. On the blog, we talk about more
than just the science – there’s also politics, social impact,
environmental issues, economic considerations, and more. We have the
potential to reach people around the English-speaking world on a wide
range of issues connected to this technology. We are hoping to gain
multilingual contributors who will be able to help reach across language
barriers.
Genetic engineering is not a "RISK or RESCUE", it is a RESCUE with
RISKS. All plant modifications have risks, including traditional
breeding, so we hope to encourage public dialogue that puts this
technology in the proper context. Biofortified will both provide
consumers with science based information about genetic engineering and
give scientists a broader perspective of the impact of their work. If we
can accomplish these goals, we will have moved the global discussion of
genetic engineering forward in a positive manner. These are just a few
of the reasons why we think Biofortified deserves your vote.
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Comments
There are many websites out there that tell people what to think about GMOs. Only a few provide information, invite people to engage in conversation, and let them decide for themselves.
There isn't any other site that encourages consumers to discuss the issues of GMOs with the scientists who are creating them. This unique conversation both allows consumers to get information from the source and allows scientists to learn more about concerns that consumers have.
This two-way conversation is why I participate in Biofortified and why it's gotten my vote!
I write for Biofortified, and I also have my name on the contest entry. Each day of the final week of voting I will post a reason why I think Biofortified deserves your vote.
Today's reason is Science. Our goal is to make factual scientific information available and accessible so that people can learn about the genetics of the foods they eat. Not only that, but we also want to help people understand how science works and what new discoveries mean for the future. To read more about this on our site, go here:
http://www.biofortified.org/2009/10/reason-1-science/
None of the other entries make a commitment to helping people understand the science. We hope you will consider voting for us!
I have viewed over the recent years, the arguments for and against GM with no bias either way initially, until that is, I received, from official sources, the level of corruption, bribes and lies perpetrated by certain companies engaged in this "new toy" of bio-engineering that no one has any idea how much damage it may or will do to the environment.
The level of crop failures on so-called drought resistant plants, failure of increased yields promised on the likes of BT Cotton all point to fraud and rushed projects, money and returns being more important to most of the GM Industry than safety or truth.
Then we have cover-ups on the established side-effects of these products that are causing great concern in places like India, France and so on.
The truth I regret to say from my observations is that there may eventually with the strictest controls imposed on the likes of Monsanto whose apparent cavalier attitude is mind-boggling to the extreme; be some measure of benefit on proven modifications to plants but, we should be in no doubt that the main drive by the GM Industry is not philanthropic and out of concern for the people, but to gain control of the world's food supply and therefore maximize their profits.
So let us cut the effluent of the Bull and be honest for once.
Although you say here you are not pro GE, on your own homepage there is a link to "Other Pro GE Blogs" implying that yours is one, too. And there is no link to anti GE blogs (which would be a requisite if you really were committed to balanced representation). You even have a link to "Monsanto According to Monsanto" (the industry blog), but no link to the powerful documentary "The World According to Monsanto." Given these facts, how can you really say that you are offering both sides? Your entry here doesn't seem honest.
Megan, please point out where we have said that we are "not pro GE". I've re-read our entry and can find no such thing. I'd appreciate it if you didn't make baseless accusations about our honesty. --- Like the other people blogging at Biofortified, I am a scientist working on genetic engineering. We see genetic engineering as a generally safe technology that may be useful in solving some problems in agriculture. In this way, we are pro-GE. --- That doesn't mean that all traits created by genetic engineering will be beneficial, or that all of them will be safe. That doesn't mean that a given trait will work in all situations, in all crops. Each situation is different and must be evaluated as such. --- At Biofortified, we do our best as scientists to evaluate evidence presented in peer-reviewed publications and other materials and translate it into language that can be understood by people who don't have college-level backgrounds in biology/genetics/biochemistry/etc. We believe that people deserve this information so they can make well-informed choices about the food they eat. Simply telling people what to think and do is condescending and not very helpful. --- We do, from time to time, present information from a variety of anti-GE sources, typically to debunk it. I have yet to find an anti-GE site that doesn't mix in fear-mongering exaggerations with their facts. I don't know why they feel the need to do this, especially since there are plenty of valid concerns about GE to discuss. I don't feel that it is ethical to present a link to a site with purposeful or accidental factual errors without at least some explanation of what a reader will find when they click the link. --- The World According to Monsanto in particular is discussed briefly in a post and then in the comments of my own blog Genetic Maize. http://geneticmaize.squarespace.com/blog/2008/9/23/contaminated.html. As a busy graduate student, I haven't yet had the time to discuss all of the errors and merits of the film. Hopefully we will earn enough votes to earn the prize here so we can attract more collaborators to Biofortified so we can share the work. --- Note: I really, really wish that Changemakers would allow paragraphs in their text boxes. Here, I've used 3 dashes to indicate separation between paragraphs.
Megan Westgate is a Executive Director of the Non-GMO project, so it comes as a surprise that on the first day of the final voting week that she is playing dirty politics and putting words in our mouth. As everyone can read above, we do not claim to not be 'pro-GE' as Megan has said. We do have a list of several blogs on the sidebar of the site which includes the Monsanto blog. She asks why we do not have a link to the anti-Monsanto film there, and quite simply, it is not a blog! We are little by little building lists of resources for people to find out more about genetic engineering, including governmental resources, scientific journals, and yes, even anti-GE sites such as the one she operates. These links will be in pages on the Biofortified site, with descriptions of the resources and links to where they have been discussed on our site, if necessary. There are many sites out there that repeat false or misleading claims one way or another, and we are trying to sift through it as best we can with our busy schedules.
It is also curious that Megan faults us for not having links to anti-GE sites, when on her own site there are no such reciprocal links. Every author listed is either anti-GE or died before knowing about it. She is applying a double-standard.
It is ironic that Megan has made stuff up in the process of calling us dishonest, and as the executive director of the non-GMO project, this reflects very poorly on them. Allow me to humbly suggest that she apologize publicly and retract her statement. I pledge to keep our involvement in this contest civil and respectful, and I hope that all other participants will join me in this pledge.
I appreciate the responses to my comment and am grateful for the opportunity to discuss further. I apologize for my misunderstanding, but stand behind my sentiment that there is room for confusion based on the wording of your entry. You say here that with your site "Discussion is two-way," but all the links you have up are pointing one way only: towards GE. I am sorry for saying that you present yourselves as "not pro GE," because you're right, you don't say that anywhere. Based on your responses, it seems you agree with my comment that you are not about presenting both sides, and I appreciate that clarification. I think my confusion is understandable. Might I suggest that if you wanted your entry to be completely clear here, you could directly say that your site is pro GE.
You're absolutely right that I am the Executive Director of the Non-GMO Project, and as such take a strong interest in what other organizations are doing to educate and inform the public. We believe that people have the right to avoid GMOs if they want to (and they also have the right to eat them if they want to as long as it doesn't negatively impact others). I think that a blog like yours could be a really useful complement to our labeling program IF it actually was a two-way discussion that gave just as much coverage to the cons as the pros. If your site did that, even I might vote for it!
I join you in your pledge to be civil and respectful, thank you.
Megan, the goal of Biofortified is to create a place for scientists and consumers to have a two-way discussion about the facts of genetic engineering. --- As we said in this contest entry, and as you can see on the Biofortified website, we have recently instituted a forum where consumers are welcome to post questions and engage in a two-way discussion aka conversation about genetic engineering. We encourage consumers to ask questions and post their concerns in the comments of our blog posts on Biofortified and contributing blogs as well. The reason why we entered this contest was so that we could better advertise and hopefully get more people to visit Biofortified so the discussion can happen. --- The other side of the coin, of course, is the scientists. Along with attracting consumers, we also need to recruit contributors. We're actively looking for graduate students and professors from a variety of fields to help contribute to the conversation through posts, videos, interviews, participating in the forum, or any other way they can. As we mentioned in the contest entry, having an interview with Michael Pollan would be a great way to introduce some of the problems with genetic engineering, and hopefully get a discussion going about those issues.
Are you open to having anti-GMO scientists as bloggers?
Scientists, like all other people, carry bias with them. What we must do, in order to be good scientists, is to acknowledge that bias and do our best to conduct experiments and analyze data without letting our bias affect what we are doing. In that sense, there should never be a scientist who says they are "pro" or "anti" anything. They can say that the evidence leads them to support one or another theory. We would gladly welcome scientists (including social scientists and other relevant professionals, such as IP lawyers and public policy experts) who have looked at the information and decided that, for whatever reason, they do not support genetic engineering as it currently exists. We would not welcome as a regular contributor a person who chooses rumor over fact. However, persons like that are not denied their chance to speak at Biofortified. They may participate in an interview, start forum topics, and participate in the conversation.
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